Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

bitcannon.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 342 posts

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#271

Post by generic_user »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #244
nnain wrote: post #193

If you're an iOS/Mac developer, there's no alternative. If you want an alternative for graphics work (or other development), try Windows. For other web development, in general, you'll be able to work well with Linux. Keeping work on different machines quickly starts to become unmanageable, that's why MacOS still leads. It gives the best of most options on the best hardware. P.S. - I tried ElementaryOS last month, for…

The problem I'm finding with graphics work is that I'm more and more relying on scripted tasks to complete things efficiently or get around deficits in Adobe's software. I'd move to Windows, but I can't imagine giving up how easy a Unix-like environment makes things.

There are multiple projects that give you a Linux user land on windows. Including bash, csh, perl, python, gcc and full toolchain. Msys2 project provides that. There are also alternative terminals.

A smarter way is to use python for automation. There are lots of graphics libraries and bindings to do what ever you want.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#272

Post by loukrazy »

kqr wrote: post #148
INTPenis wrote: post #146

I had the same prejudice about Fedora and RedHat back when I was a debian fanboy. But if you look at what Redhat is doing with their money and their company then you soon realize that Redhat Inc. not only IS a large part of the Linux community, but also supports the open source movement in many ways. So Fedora has been my main distro of choice for a couple years now. I still hesitate to order RHEL licenses at work, u…

I agree. My impression of RHEL and its likes is that they are "slow and outdated", but the more actual research I do, the more I feel like using them for their stability and security.

It seems to take a few releases longer for new features to move from Fedora to RHEL, but RHEL 7 is pretty current. That stability is great though, you can stay on one version of RHEL for a very long time and still get patch support, especially since major upgrades are so traumatic on most Linux distributions (RHEL included)

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#273

Post by medemas-os »

freehunter wrote: post #217
DavideNL wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated Same here! Also i start to suffer from 'update-fatigue' when using Windows. The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources... it all just feels so clumsy. I've never experienced anything like this in OSX.

That's probably the only thing that truly irritates me about Windows these days. Everything else is just a design decision that, as a technical user, I am easily able to adapt to. But not knowing if my machine is going to decide to reboot itself at any random moment without me having the option to stop it from doing that? Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable. I know you should save often and bad things can happen li…

>> But not knowing if my machine is going to decide to reboot itself at any random moment without me having the option to stop it from doing that? Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.

First of all you can set the time interval when the Windows will be able to update https://i.imgur.com/BZNadeE.png

And even if you are working in this time Windows ask you what do you prefer - reboot now or later.

I'am not Windows fanboy. I sue MacOS, Windows and Linux at the same time.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#274

Post by QSIITurbo »

DavideNL wrote: post #190
mrweasel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

> but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated Same here! Also i start to suffer from 'update-fatigue' when using Windows. The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources... it all just feels so clumsy. I've never experienced anything like this in OSX.

I assume this fixes the reboot problem:

http://superuser.com/questions/946957/stopping-all-automatic...

I'm managing a friend's Win10Pro machine and so far it's been awesome. On the other hand, OSX which I'm running seems clunky and old-fashioned.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#275

Post by jasim »

ourcat wrote: post #263
jasim wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a programmer like you and used to believe in the idea that you should design in the medium which is HTML and CSS, and not in a tool like Photoshop or Sketch. But I've completely reversed my stance after working with a lot of designers who create beautiful sites that goes very well with the grain of the web. The reason is direct manipulation. You're not thinking in terms of the DOM's static flow when trying to cre…

Mostly hand-coding since ~'94. Also waded through the code-soup created by Dreamweaver for a bit. Thought it might save time having 'the designer' do the layout. It didn't. ;)

cynicism is well warranted. but if you're open to possibilities, they might pleasantly surprise you.

> This claim is typically met with skepticism. Isn’t generated code unusable? Are the elements going to be absolutely positioned? Would the CSS classes be named correctly, and how reusable would they be?

https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/code-generator-to-crea...

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#276

Post by teaearlgraycold »

amalag wrote: post #242
ldev wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only teraflops and ram size defines "best"; MBP's touchpad is the only touchpad on any laptop that I can work with without pluging in a mouse after a minute. Screen is good. General feeling of quality is just the best.

Yeah at this point I would need a replacement for OSX and for the touchpad to be able to go away from a Mac. I can live with their other issues for the benefits of their trackpads and an operating system backed by Unix

I just use the track-point on my thinkpad. It's preferable to its trackpad (which I actually have disabled in the BIOS).

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#277

Post by [deleted] »

amalag wrote: post #242
ldev wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only teraflops and ram size defines "best"; MBP's touchpad is the only touchpad on any laptop that I can work with without pluging in a mouse after a minute. Screen is good. General feeling of quality is just the best.

Yeah at this point I would need a replacement for OSX and for the touchpad to be able to go away from a Mac. I can live with their other issues for the benefits of their trackpads and an operating system backed by Unix

[deleted]

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#278

Post by WorldMaker »

slantyyz wrote: post #268
WorldMaker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"watch" works great in Node when "natively" installed, rather than Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Natively installed Node is a great development experience on Windows these days (just make sure you install a version with NPM >= 3, which is now no longer an issue as even current LTS has NPM >= 3). On the flipside, Ruby remains a nightmare to install natively and Ubuntu Bash is the easiest way to work with it. There I real…

btw, what do you mean by Node when "natively" installed. I used the Windows installer from the node site. Is that what you meant? The issue I get with watch is that it doesn't properly detect added files in a watched subfolder, although changes and deletions are detected with no issue.

Interesting, I've not noticed that problem, but just realized in my typical usage of a watch in Node I don't usually add new files.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#279

Post by Roboprog »

morganvachon wrote: post #257
rahkiin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it will tell you and you can say no. On Windows, you can only extend the actual reboot, sometimes, and that within 30 seconds. If you go for a pee, you might return to a rebooting machine.

Sounds like you need to specify your active hours. See these settings in the Windows Update settings panel: http://imgur.com/VfcdIEd

It's unfortunate that a user needs to find such an option. It's likely that the location and UI of the option will be changed yet again each release.

MS "needs" (?) to prioritize "don't torment your users". Of course, for corporate captives, they can torment away with impunity since The Management has already decided You Must Endure... (and probably locked out the setting in question, as well)

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#280

Post by WorldMaker »

slantyyz wrote: post #267
WorldMaker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"watch" works great in Node when "natively" installed, rather than Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Natively installed Node is a great development experience on Windows these days (just make sure you install a version with NPM >= 3, which is now no longer an issue as even current LTS has NPM >= 3). On the flipside, Ruby remains a nightmare to install natively and Ubuntu Bash is the easiest way to work with it. There I real…

>> Ruby remains a nightmare to install natively I cheated and used RubyInstaller for Windows, and it's worked great for me for the past couple of years, but I guess it really comes down to how you use it and what you need.

I always seem to need to install native dependencies for Ruby (often dependencies of dependencies of github-pages; I know github-pages seems to be trying to remove native dependencies, but as with all dependency cleanup games, it seems like a bit of whack-a-mole) and installing the DevKit and getting the DevKit working and getting the native dependencies to install has been a different beast every time I've ever tried to do it.

Eventually I always seemed to hit a non-cross-platform-capable makefile somewhere, and could only throw my hands up in despair and give up.

Definitely a lot easier in the Ubuntu on Windows userspace. (Though I was still fighting some weird fires with rvm and whatnot. Given I pretty much only ever need Ruby for github-pages/Jekyll work, I'm sure there is much I don't know about Ruby and a lot of the pain of the Ruby ecosystem to me is simply the fact that of the major 'modern web dev' ecosystems [node, python, ruby] it is the one I know and use the least.)

Post reply on HN