Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000 • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#371

Post by e40 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #357

nkoren wrote: post #190

Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…

Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs. That's where I'm stuck. We're all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I'm no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I'd say about Mac OS: "this is what an operating system should be". Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don't say that anymore. Too much half-assed sh…

So in truth, when the 2012 MBP dies, I have no idea what I'm going to do to replace it.

There are used MBPs available from various reputable sources. That's my goto at work, when someone's laptop dies.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#372

Post by ben509 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

erikbye wrote: post #295

machello13 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it still have weird modals where you're forced to use the mouse to select an option? I don't think I've ever encountered a modal like this. Not with "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" turned on. By keyboard-based window management you mean being able to tile windows? That can be added with a third-party app pretty easily, but I think it's much a much less fundamental problem than those po…

So that answers my question? You still, in 2019, cannot even move a window/app on the desktop in vanilla macOS using your keyboard? That, to me, is crazy. How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature? Simply the equivalent of Windows' win + arrow keys would be a huge improvement. I know third party software offers such features and more, I am simply not interested, some are even paid…

> You still, in 2019, cannot even move a window/app on the desktop in vanilla macOS using your keyboard?

> That, to me, is crazy. How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature?

That's one solution to the problem of selecting the thing you want to work on.

Apple's solution has been to throw hardware at the problem. You have gestures, expose, mission control, etc. all available from a really good touchpad.

It would be crazy for a linux distro to take that approach because they can't bundle a high quality touchpad with every laptop they sell.

I definitely don't claim their approach that they will do best of class support for a pointing-heavy workload will suit everyone, just that it makes sense for a combined OS and hardware vendor.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#373

Post by machello13 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

erikbye wrote: post #295

machello13 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it still have weird modals where you're forced to use the mouse to select an option? I don't think I've ever encountered a modal like this. Not with "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" turned on. By keyboard-based window management you mean being able to tile windows? That can be added with a third-party app pretty easily, but I think it's much a much less fundamental problem than those po…

So that answers my question? You still, in 2019, cannot even move a window/app on the desktop in vanilla macOS using your keyboard? That, to me, is crazy. How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature? Simply the equivalent of Windows' win + arrow keys would be a huge improvement. I know third party software offers such features and more, I am simply not interested, some are even paid…

It answers one part of your question. The other issue you pointed out doesn't actually exist.

> How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature?

The answer, as it always is in cases like this, is that Apple thinks most users don't want or need the feature. Apple probably considers full screen mode to cover the use case of wanting two windows side-by-side. Personally, I never tile windows to either side of my screen — I prefer to have my windows laid out all over the screen and then switch using cmd+tab or mouse. IMO, this is what windows were designed for.

> What fundamental problems?

The ones pointed out all over this thread.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#374

Post by augstein » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #357

nkoren wrote: post #190

Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…

Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs. That's where I'm stuck. We're all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I'm no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I'd say about Mac OS: "this is what an operating system should be". Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don't say that anymore. Too much half-assed sh…

Just get a 2015 MBP. These are the last ones with MagSafe and more than Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#375

Post by FPGAhacker » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #357

nkoren wrote: post #190

Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…

Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs. That's where I'm stuck. We're all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I'm no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I'd say about Mac OS: "this is what an operating system should be". Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don't say that anymore. Too much half-assed sh…

Find a used 2015 mbp. I love mine (15 inch, mid 2015).

I probably would have upgraded for a better gpu, but the keyboards are too iffy for me. I shed a lot, and if dust/detritus is the mbp keyboard killer, it will never work for me.

Honestly I mostly use my iPad now. Work-work is still a dell laptop with win 10, and is daily torture to use. Mostly from all the corporate spyware my employer loads it down with.

At home, even for coding, I use the iPad second gen 12.9 and a vps.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#376

Post by woah » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #291

llimllib wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago. * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff) * T…

Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared. I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been…

Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#377

Post by mikestew » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work.

Is this true? Because I'll tell you a story about my early days of using Mac OS. We've all sat in meetings waiting for someone to do the Fn-F5/Ctrl-Alt-F3 dance trying to get the laptop to output to the projector. I had to do a presentation, and using Mac OS for the first to do so. "Oh, shoot, I don't even know the keyboard dance to do to hook it up. Meh, plug it in, figure it out in a minute." Plugged it in and...it just worked(tm). As soon as cable touched plug, it output to the projector. Fuckin'-A. And here's the kicker: Mac OS was running on a Hackintosh, not real Apple hardware. That right there was enough to sell me on Mac OS. I don't connect to random external monitors much anymore, but I've never had a problem getting output to any random display I've hooked a Mac to.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#378

Post by rjzzleep » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #291

llimllib wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago. * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff) * T…

Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared. I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been…

I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits.

The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives.

AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries.

GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes.

QT while great is nowhere near the ease of use of the cocoa frameworks and for every 20 cocoa books you find one QT book.

Bottom line is, as much as you may hate Xcode it's exponentially easier to make a good looking application on a mac compared to any linux counterpart. At the end of the day, people want to use (for example) photoshop or something similar without dual booting.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#379

Post by bluedino » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

Mac user since 2010. At the time the laptop hardware was just so far ahead of anything else when it came to battery life and sleekness.

I still like it for general use (web, development, terminal stuff).

But the hardware is driving me away. Un-repairable, expensive, non-upgradeable, failure-prone...

I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro with a fan that gets annoying clickity/clackity, $500 repair from the Apple store. No thanks I will live with it.

One of my biggest pet peeves with MacOS is that even though it's so nice to use, it's just so damn slow. Everything is slow. When I user a lesser Windows 10 or Ubuntu machine, it feels like a rocket.

The only thing that feels fast on a Mac is Safari.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#380

Post by least » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #304

least wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your prerogative to do what you want with your machine. Caps lock being on the home row is a bad design in my opinion. Remapping it to something useful is making your hardware work for you, not against you. You obviously can't make your coworkers change their behavior but you're completely in control of your own, where most of your work is likely being done.

My hardware does already work for me. Remapping caps lock is a micro-optimisation where as committing keystrokes to muscle memory is not. So the jarring effect I'd experience when switching back to a system that doesn't have caps lock remapped would easily outstrip any benefit I'd receive from it.

I switch between different keyboard layouts fairly frequently (I use a kinesis advantage 2 which is quite different from traditional keyboards) so maybe it is just being used to being somewhat uncomfortable when having to type on other keyboards that is making it harder to appreciate the difficulty it actually presents to others.

It seems like you are using different keyboards constantly so fixing it on one laptop maybe doesn't offer you much benefit. I doubt that everyone that reads this is constantly changing keyboards, though. For those it would certainly be beneficial unless they are for whatever reason using caps lock frequently.