51–60 of 218 posts
If Apple can put an authentication chip in a phone cable, what is stopping them to lock down macos? They don't want to do that.
For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker end of the spectrum and doesn't depend on commercial software, the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. Ditto OpenBSD, etc. I'll never go back. At least it does if you've already come around to using a deskto…
Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with O…
My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual 1440p external monitors, and haven't run into issues losing heads, however, I wrote my own auto-detect and screen layout wrapper for xrandr so that it would consistently do what I wanted. Basically, my window manager makes calls like: `xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-2 --left-of DP-2-1 --auto --output eDP-1 --auto` when I connect to my docking station and `xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-1 --off --output DP-2-2 --off --output HDMI-2 --off --output HDMI-1 --off` when I disconnect. MacOS's screen arrangement consistency was pretty great, though - on par with the consistency of my own script.
I think the improvement of moving from MacOS to Linux for me has been that I don't have to try to figure out how the OS "magic" works to make it do what I want, because there is no magic, it's just scripts I've written myself and I understand them because I wrote them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's for developers they don't have to guarantee it. I'm happily running a hackintosh right now. If they made it a little easier we wouldn't have to do weird hacks to spoof hardware ids just so messages work.
I think the iOS "developer previews" have shown that even if you label something as being "unstable and just for developers" you'll still end up with thousands upon thousands of people with no idea what they're doing running it anyways and subsequently being vocally horrified that not everything works perfectly.
For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker end of the spectrum and doesn't depend on commercial software, the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. Ditto OpenBSD, etc. I'll never go back. At least it does if you've already come around to using a deskto…
For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better."
For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless.
At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me."
Good! Happy for you. Seriously.
For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works".
In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements.
For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that.
I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS
If that's the problem, then why not create a subsidiary firm and call it, I don't know, Pear, Gala, McIntire, Darwin or something. Let this firm build hackintoshes from off-the-shelf components. The trick is then to remove any reference to Apple and every logo from the OS. People "in the know" would be able to buy a Pear and use it just like a Mac.
This would be really cheap to pull off, just give some people a factory and a few million dollars, and would put next to no strain on Apple proper. It's really just buying a few blessed components, putting them together, and creating a boot disk with the needed kexts. Any mom and pop computer shop can do that if it weren't for legal issues. In the next year's iteration you can talk about custom hardware / buying at scale.
Honestly, Apple should make a Mac tower, and then incentivize graphic card manufacturers to write drivers. Imagine a Mac with not last years cards, but current generation cards. No custom bios BS like they had before, just buy a card, put it in, install the driver.
As of last week newer (newest?) NVIDIA GPUs work and are supported for hackintosh and presumably Mac desktops
I've heard they are worried about brand dilution. If that's the problem, then why not create a subsidiary firm and call it, I don't know, Pear, Gala, McIntire, Darwin or something. Let this firm build hackintoshes from off-the-shelf components. The trick is then to remove any reference to Apple and every logo from the OS. People "in the know" would be able to buy a Pear and use it just like a Mac. This would be reall…
Why not allow developers to build their own Macs? The situation today in completely different than 1995-1996, when Apple briefly allowed Macintosh clones, before Jobs killed the project because they were cannibalizing Apple's high-end desktop sales. Now high-end desktop sales are such a small part of Apple's line that they let the products stagnate for years. Are Mac Pro motherboards really going to compete with note…
hey before I answer you wanna take a stab at that question?
EDIT: I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a fairly close analogy.
If Apple can put an authentication chip in a phone cable, what is stopping them to lock down macos? They don't want to do that.
They have this in the form of a legal note, don't they? Last I heard it was technically "illegal" to run macOS on anything other than Apple hardware per the TOS. Or is that just an urban legend?
It is a software license issue. Technically it would be something like unlicensed distribution/copying.
Practically speaking they don't care though. The machine building market is vanishingly small and the licensing gives Apple plausible "we never said it would work" deniability.