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Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

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Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#91

Post by fusiongyro »

Clubber wrote: post #12

>Note that I don’t currently consider Windows a viable alternative. For the work that I do (Rails) and tools I use something *nix based is the best choice for me. For what it's worth Windows 10 now has a bash shell based on Ubuntu available. http://www.howtogeek.com/249966/how-to-install-and-use-the-l...

I'm thinking about trying it, but a friend of mine said that he could crash it easily by just doing the examples from Mastering the Linux Command Line. I think a Surface might make a decent piece of hardware but either WSL (i.e. the horrendously named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) has to get a lot more stable or Linux support will have to improve. I hear Linux support for the Surface Pro 3 is basically there, but SP4 still needs some work.

All word-of-mouth, of course.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#92

Post by fusiongyro »

massysett wrote: post #41
codeka wrote: post #20

> The first option I tried was an i3 based desktop. However whilst I wanted to like tiling window managers I decided it wasn’t for me. It took me a week or so to get used to i3, but once I did I can't see myself ever going back. I've been using i3 at work and at home for about year now, and every time I get on my (Mac Book) laptop it's a frustrating experience: I feel like I spend more time trying to figure out how t…

i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect. Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the…

I'm on a Mac but at this point I could probably take it or leave it. Most of my life is shell + Firefox + Emacs + IntelliJ, and those all run basically the same regardless of OS.

If anything, my plan would be to move more of my life into Emacs so that I'm even less exposed to stupid ideas from my OS/laptop vendor.

I have been using i3 on a netbook for the last two days and I can definitely see how it would be lovely. But then again, Linux has changed a lot since I was into it seriously and I'm sure I will experience pain if I have to do anything substantial to tweak it, like symlink timezone files.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#93

Post by fusiongyro »

bdcravens wrote: post #84
marpstar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation

That was a company selling Hackintoshes. In the many years since, Hackintoshes have remained a thing and I'm unaware of any individuals that have faced criminal or civil penalties.

Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac. As Apple is starting to drive us away, I bet the phenomenon will grow, and then Apple's interest in squishing it will too. And the fact is, Apple could shut this phenomenon down in a matter of hours if they wanted to.

This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#94

Post by michaelmrose »

massysett wrote: post #41
codeka wrote: post #20

> The first option I tried was an i3 based desktop. However whilst I wanted to like tiling window managers I decided it wasn’t for me. It took me a week or so to get used to i3, but once I did I can't see myself ever going back. I've been using i3 at work and at home for about year now, and every time I get on my (Mac Book) laptop it's a frustrating experience: I feel like I spend more time trying to figure out how t…

i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect. Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the…

How could you not figure out how to do this? You can very well use gui configuration utilities + i3.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#95

Post by slantyyz »

mcphage wrote: post #9
princetontiger wrote: post #3

Funny that this got written. I've looked at switching from macOS to Windows 10. My first operating system was Windows 95. I then upgraded to 98, and later XP. I decided to go with a Mac in 2008 after Windows Vista just couldn't get itself together.

The author specifically excluded Windows because they're a Rails developer.

I've been doing Rails dev on Windows for a couple of years now (I use cmder/conemu, not the linux subystem). For the most part, my workflow is similar to what I was doing when I was on Mac, but I guess it really depends on what you're doing.

If there's something in Rails you can't do in Windows proper, you can still opt to use Vagrant on Windows for a more pure unix experience.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#96

Post by fusiongyro »

saghm wrote: post #86
twblalock wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used FreeBSD as a desktop OS, briefly. I've also used a number of Linux distributions as desktop OSes since the late 1990s. The bottom line is that Linux tends to have better hardware support, especially for laptop hardware and power management. When you run into problems, you'll usually have a much easier time finding vendor support or online community help for a Linux distribution than for FreeBSD. Under the h…

> The bottom line is that Linux tends to have better hardware support, especially for laptop hardware and power management. I've been playing around with various BSDs over the past couple of years, and I really want to like any of them enough to keep installed, but this is exactly the issue I've run into with freebsd and it's derivatives. On both my last laptop and the current one, I can get everything working to a f…

I tried NetBSD on my Acer Aspire One netbook from like six years ago. Most things worked out of the box. One thing that did not was the keyboard did not wake after suspend, which was manual (typing apm -z). I decided that was a deal-breaker and switched to Ubuntu, which worked perfectly out of the box, including lid-shut suspend.

NetBSD also gave me a bizarre halt-the-world problem on installation the first few times ("Old BPB too big") until I skipped the first sector.

I figure this laptop is old enough if it isn't supported by now it won't ever be.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#97

Post by bdcravens »

fusiongyro wrote: post #93
bdcravens wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a company selling Hackintoshes. In the many years since, Hackintoshes have remained a thing and I'm unaware of any individuals that have faced criminal or civil penalties.

Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac. As Apple is starting to drive us away, I bet the phenomenon will grow, and then Apple's interest in squishing it will too. And the fact is, Apple could shut this phenomenon down in a matter of hours if they wanted to. This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.

There's the potential to create a pretty powerful machine for the buck, but it's definitely fraught with challenge. Reminds me of building a decent desktop Linux machine in the late 90's/early 2000's.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#98

Post by stormbrew »

sudhirj wrote: post #45
wezm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I suspect the keyboard shortcuts will bother me too. One of the things I like about Elementary is that there are a bunch of things bound to Command out of the box. They also refer to it as ⌘, which has a nice familiarity about it.

The underlying Ubuntu still refers to it as the Super key, but elementary uses the clover to symbolise it when it can. Still can't get to Mac like setups, though - apparently in Linux it's the applications that intercept the Super key, so it's never going to be possible to get a consistent experience.

Window managers definitely get a first crack at keyboard input. For example, I have a bunch of super-related keyboard combos set in i3wm that always go to it. I doubt that's the problem you're referring to. More likely it's that the window manager has no consistent means to make any given window/app do anything in particular, like copy or paste. The app decides its own key combos for those. There's no universal way to do it globally short of using nothing but apps that are specifically intended to work with gnome or kde or another uberenvironment's configuration system. Basically, you could bind super-c at the WM level, but you couldn't make it always copy.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#99

Post by disiplus »

fusiongyro wrote: post #93
bdcravens wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a company selling Hackintoshes. In the many years since, Hackintoshes have remained a thing and I'm unaware of any individuals that have faced criminal or civil penalties.

Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac. As Apple is starting to drive us away, I bet the phenomenon will grow, and then Apple's interest in squishing it will too. And the fact is, Apple could shut this phenomenon down in a matter of hours if they wanted to. This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.

not really, i was running osx 10.5, so almost 10 years ago out of the box, the only thing that i had to play with was sound.

there was only one rule and i believe the same i truth now, if you plan to run hackintosh u better watch what hardware you get. if you do that u can run hackintosh without problems.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#100

Post by mrweasel »

Clubber wrote: post #12

>Note that I don’t currently consider Windows a viable alternative. For the work that I do (Rails) and tools I use something *nix based is the best choice for me. For what it's worth Windows 10 now has a bash shell based on Ubuntu available. http://www.howtogeek.com/249966/how-to-install-and-use-the-l...

I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated.

In my view, Windows 10 is still miles away in consistency across the entire system, compared to macOS. Windows 10 actually made it worse, because it's trying to accommodate both Windows 7 and Windows 8 design.

Currently I don't think we have alternatives to macOS. I understand that I sound like a grumpy Apple fanboy, but Windows is't ready to replace macOS. The distance between macOS and Windows have increased in the later years, and not because Apple have improved anything, it's Microsoft who have made Windows worse.

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