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

Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

darlinghq.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#141

Post by patrec »

snazz wrote: post #139
patrec wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was with you right up until you made the cheap shot at Linux. That was as unnecessary as it was untrue. Here are some concrete examples: - macOS has essentially a single set of efficient and consistent keybindings that works everywhere. Command line and GUI work essentially the same, i can use emacs style navigation with C-a C-e C-f C-b etc. everywhere. I can copy with Cmd-C and paste with Cmd-V in my terminal. T…

Re. keybindings: you can change your default GTK bindings to Emacs-style if you want to. Whether the super/Windows/Command key should be used for window management or application controls is still up for debate; it always bothers me whenever I have to use a Mac that some browser bindings are already taken by the WM/OS because Cmd is shared between apps and the OS. There are very few bindings that you can’t change on…

> Better to just use Git.

How would this help with my example? Git is terrible for managing non-text files and has zero support for browsing such files interactively. It also doesn't work at the file level and is pretty much unusable for anyone who isn't a developer.

> Re. keybindings: you can change your default GTK bindings to Emacs-style if you want to.

Yeah, but that doesn't really work, it just makes the whole mess even worse (oops, no longer can select everything with a shortcut, webapps, other toolkits don't care etc).

> Do you prefer maximum available memory or responsiveness? Linux gives you the choice here.

It doesn't. I want responsiveness, but I can't have it. Turning off overcommit (and swap) does improve responsiveness but is not a viable option for a desktop system, apps will just break if you turn off overcommit completely.

> Recency, contents and type can all be sorted with Nautilus on GNOME.

For me this works neither reliably nor with acceptable performance (unsurprising since a proper version needs FS integration).

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#142

Post by ktpsns »

yacoob wrote: post #107
iLemming wrote: post #55

I really want something like Hammerspoon, but for Linux

Surely there's something equivalent...? I've used Linux on desktop exclusively ~95-07. Switched to MacOS after that. Tried out mythical "Linux on the desktop" in 2018, was amused to find that iTerm2 has grown so much, and there's hard to find a good replacement for it under Linux. Of all the things I'd expect it to handle well... 8)

One of the most sophisticated Linux terminal emulators I worked with is Konsole, the KDE terminal. However, I never worked long enought with iTerm2 to learn all the features. My feeling is that there is a growing crowd of Linuxers who go for "minimalism", like tiling WMs and minimal terminal emulators, and using tools like tmux or zsh to streamline their experience.

Regarding Hammerspoon (which reminds me very much on what you can do with AppleScript), you certainly can do many of the examples (https://www.hammerspoon.org/go/#spoons) with modern-day frameworks like xdg, dbus, libevent, inotify. My feeling is that (for instance) Python PIP has pretty comprehensive libraries which allows you to use it as a glue language for all that interfaces. I would not be surprised if that even feels slimmer and more powerful then Lua in the end, but it's a matter of taste. As always.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#143

Post by w8rbt »

ncmncm wrote: post #73

The main attraction of Apple products is the certainty that, no matter what you do, they cannot be made to do what you would like. The consequence is that you feel no urge to spend time tinkering to get there, and instead adapt yourself to what it actually does. This reclaims all the time and attention that you would have spent on tinkering. Since what Apple products do has proven adequate for a large number of peopl…

Insightful comment. I call this 'working on the car more than we drive it'. You see that a lot in tech. It's fine as a hobby, but not for production. You do need both as the tinkering helps us to master concepts and systems and find new, better ways which end-up becoming best practice in the stable, production systems. Just have to known when to tinker and when to not.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#144

Post by sjwright »

microcolonel wrote: post #123
sjwright wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. Yes, maybe there might be more 3D apps and faster 3D apps if the video driver situation was better, but also maybe not? Either way, this is all irrelevant be…

> As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. I shipped an application with WebGL under the impression that it would not need to be custom tested on a decade's worth of MacBooks Pro, but received a report later that a user had lost data because the graphics driver restarted the windowing system when he opened my webpage. If an honest, non-malicious webpage ca…

Woah there buddy.

— Apple makes it extremely easy for anyone to start backing up their computer in a way that covers an array of scenarios from accidental or malicious deletions to full-on disaster recovery.

— It has everything to do with MacOS because the creation of backups happens within a MacOS environment and the restoring of backups happens within a MacOS environment. The only "firmware" aspect is the (relatively) simple boot-time keyboard triggers.

— Apple's solution to damaged devices is having a comprehensive backup strategy. If your plan is to recover data from a damaged device, you've failed before you begin. Apple doesn't offer first-party data recovery services, but there are plenty of third party services to handle disaster recovery situations. To the extent that they make it difficult for you to recover data from a damaged device, it's because they do robust on-disk encryption.

— Yes, any vendor "could" offer the same thing. That's exactly the point. They could. Most don't. That's the point.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#145

Post by WhiteOwlLion »

vaylian wrote: post #113
yoz-y wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Mac users come from Linux and Windows (of course there are migrations in other directions too), most developers on MacOS also use Linux daily. So I'd wager most of them understand what you mean, but disagree. Personally I like to tinker and personalise only a subset of tools I use to get things done (iTerm, tmux, vim...) and have good defaults on the rest.

You are talking about developers. I am talking about regular non-IT people. IT people know that they can just SSH into a Linux server or that they can run Linux in a VM or a container. Regular people don't know these things. > Personally I like to tinker and personalise only a subset > of tools I use to get things done (iTerm, tmux, vim...) > and have good defaults on the rest. If these things are good enough out of…

IT people need to spend more time with their non-IT moms. It really does ground you to reality more.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#146

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

The comments here sound like they are from Android users who go on about how great Android is because they can spend hours tweaking their phones and rooting them and side loading them. LOL. "made to do what you like". Dudes, just get Windows 10 and install WSL and tweak away.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#147

Post by laumars »

patrec wrote: post #131
laumars wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are countless of utilities for tinkering with you mac setup and the best and most tinker-y terminal for any platform is a mac-only app (iterm2). It's just that macOS starts out with a far high usability level without tinkering and comes with lots of basic stuff working that no amount of tinkering will ever give you with linux I was with you right up until you made the cheap shot at Linux. That was as unnecess…

> I was with you right up until you made the cheap shot at Linux. That was as unnecessary as it was untrue. Here are some concrete examples: - macOS has essentially a single set of efficient and consistent keybindings that works everywhere. Command line and GUI work essentially the same, i can use emacs style navigation with C-a C-e C-f C-b etc. everywhere. I can copy with Cmd-C and paste with Cmd-V in my terminal. T…

I don't mind OSX - honestly there's bits of it I do genuinely like. But it's blind-sighted fanboyism that really does the platform harm.

> keybindings

Honestly, I find Mac OS keybindings and keyboard layout the worst thing about using Macs. Yes it might make some sense but when literally every other platform on the planet follows the same standard apart from Apple, it then makes Apple the ugly stepsister regardless of how rational it might be on paper.

I mean if you only ever use Macs then I guess you might like it, but for anyone who swaps between systems (or even just wants to use a non-mac keyboard) it can be very annoying.

> file history

You can have that in Linux

> Cmd-? (how do I do that on Linux?)

shrugs maybe you can't. But that's just one feature. As a counterargument I could list a dozen things that are in Linux that aren't in OSX. Like up to date core utils and proper package management. Which are just about the two most important things on a dev machine - far more important than Cmd-?. And sure you could install GNU core utils via brew, none of that is part of the default OS X build - which matters because the whole basis of your argument was that OSX has better defaults.

Ultimately though I don't see the point in nitpicking each OS - feature by feature.

> finding files

I'd already disagreed this in my previous post after you made that claim earlier

> MacOS can recover from memory pressure fine. How do I get my linux machine not to effectively crash if I run an app that happens to use too much memory (technically it just swaps itself to death, in practice reset is the only remotely timely way to recover)? I've tried any amount of tweaking, but turns out that you can't turn off overcommit and swap completely, even if have lots of memory, things will just break randomly (chrome for example).

The problem there is the application. However Linux will just kill the last process that over allocates memory. If you're getting the kind of symptoms you've described then you've either fiddled with your swap file settings (so not running defaults) and/or you're running Linux on some pretty awesome spinning disks while comparing it to nice fast SSDs on OSX. Either way, you're not comparing like for like.

> Can you point me at something on linux that comes anywhere close to spotlight/mdfind?

There's loads. Krunner, for example, has all the same features as Spotlight plus supports plugins to extend it. For example I can run math calculations in it - which I haven't yet worked out how to do in Spotlight.

> For what it's worth: I'm using both linux and macOS daily and am both productive and reasonably expert with both.

But do you actually use desktop Linux on modern hardware? Or are you just running Linux on a few servers and guessing about the desktop experience. I ask because your comments were valid about 10 or 15 years ago but really aren't the case any longer.

> That is not to say that linux isn't more ergonomic for certain things, but in my experience they tend to be mostly limited to things only programmers would care about

This I do wholeheartedly agree with.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#148

Post by pjmlp »

snazz wrote: post #132
abricot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because it has a lot of features that are not unique, but you won't find all of them in a single terminal emulator on Linux. Example, I don't know about a terminal on linux that both works as a drop down terminal (quake-like) & supports inline images. Or split screen & password manager.

For the split screen functionality, I’d recommend tmux or Terminator. If you try w3m on xterm, you’ll notice that inline images can work. Could someone enlighten me as to why inline images are useful in the first place?

Imagine something like Jupiter Notebooks as shell.

That was the REPL of non-UNIX graphical workstations of uore, and inline images was naturally part of it.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#149

Post by turtlebits »

ncmncm wrote: post #73

The main attraction of Apple products is the certainty that, no matter what you do, they cannot be made to do what you would like. The consequence is that you feel no urge to spend time tinkering to get there, and instead adapt yourself to what it actually does. This reclaims all the time and attention that you would have spent on tinkering. Since what Apple products do has proven adequate for a large number of peopl…

I disagree, Apple products are popular because they just work (for most people).

I was a strict Windows user for a long time, and I remember the days of reinstalling Windows every few weeks or so to get performance back. Microsoft seems to acknowledge this (but not fix!) with the feature of resetting your PC.

I stopped using linux when the system completely broke after updates (on a slow connection) and spent way too much time trying to fix it. (This was last year on Ubuntu)

When I was younger I'd just deal with them, but now I just use OS X.

Re: Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux

#150

Post by earenndil »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #61
earenndil wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, that was the case, but recently older applications have been breaking in recent versions of windows. And windows and macos both have hacks in place to fix older versions of popular applications (ms office, adobe suite, etc.).

While Windows's backwards compatibility is sadly getting worse, it's also still pretty incredible. I can run lots of obscure Windows programs that 2+ decades old! Mac backwards compatibility isn't as bad as some people say—I have a decade-old program that still works in Mojave, for instance—but Windows is a lot better. The platform with awful backwards compatibility is iOS. And there, you don't even have the option t…

Honestly, the only time ios has broken backwards compatibility is with 32->64 bit. And—not to minimize that, that is quite major, but that's pretty much the only time it's happened.
Post reply on HN