The End of OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of OS X

#271

Post by pmontra » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

crystaln wrote: post #123

lordleft wrote: post #64

I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix…

I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from Apple. Unix with good design is exactly what I want from my OS. Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would and you may be among them.

I upgraded my current laptop from 8 to 16 GB to 32 since 2014. I replaced the 750 GB HDD with 1 TB SDD. Then I replaced the DVD with another 1 TB SDD. It was as easy as slide the bottom out, loose a couple of screws and that's it. Ok, I concede that replacing a worn out keyboard was not as easy as on YouTube but I like serviceable hardware.

Re: The End of OS X

#272

Post by webmobdev » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #252

banachtarski wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially for GPU support for either graphics/rendering work or machine learning) and my downsides are... what exactly? Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I don't use Safari. From your perspective, what aspect of the "cust…

I use Safari as my main browser now due to the password generation/sharing with my iPhone. It's a killer feature for me.

Use a password manager. It's safer than trusting Apple or Google who are after your personal data.

Re: The End of OS X

#273

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #253

parasubvert wrote: post #84

I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop, and look forward to see what the next generations can do. But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes. If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvabl…

> The main thing I miss is Spotlight search, but there are third party replacements for that. Such as? I've been looking for a decent launcher for Windows but all the options are pretty mediocre compared to Spotlight (or Alfred which is what I use).

Launchy[1] used to be good, but hasn't been updated in a decade. I'm not sure if it works in latest Windows 10.

[1] https://www.launchy.net

Re: The End of OS X

#274

Post by chooseaname » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #84

I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop, and look forward to see what the next generations can do. But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes. If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvabl…

> Linux is only free if your time has no value.

I don't get this. I have more issues with Windows 10 than I do Ubuntu. Linux used to be fiddly, but not anymore. Windows 10 forgets stuff. You have bluetooth? Nope, maybe if you reboot you'll get it back. Hibernate your laptop and take it to the coffee shop. Black screen. Have to reboot.

I don't have issues like this with Linux.

Now, some of that could just be Lenovo. But Linux on Lenovo is fine.

Re: The End of OS X

#275

Post by luma » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

wuunderbar wrote: post #255

cortesoft wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes. Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.

I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Seems like an easy way to screw up your OS installation. And it's not like a VM where you can rollback to a snapshot or relaunch. If there really was an issue there then you either need to file a bug and have them mainline a fix, or yes hack/shim a fix on top for your needs. Perhaps leveraging PATH precedence.

Embedded in your response is the general attitude one hears when concerned about not being able to do "a thing" in the Apple ecosystem: why would you want to do that?

Questioning the use case and insisting that one doesn't actually _want_ to do a thing instead of allowing the user to control their own system is the quintessential Apple experience.

Re: The End of OS X

#276

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

ilikehurdles wrote: post #249

sudosysgen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If SSDs don't fail, more RAM isn't needed, and so on, then why do people feel the need to buy a new laptop every three years? I think the percentage of users that would buy a new, 1500$+ machine instead of a small 100$ upgrade is much lower than one expects living in a bit of an echo chamber. There's a lot of people that get burned by outrageous repair prices or that buy new computers when they could simply upgrade a…

> why do people feel the need to buy a new laptop every three years? Beats me. You will often see comments in these threads about people (like me) using nearly decade-old Macbook Pros to this day. I stopped replacing laptops every 3 (or less) years after I stopped buying budget non-Apple laptops.

Well, a lot of people aren't upgrading old MacBooks because the new ones have been such shite.

I'm on Linux, and a laptop I can take apart and replace bits of, so I can see myself using this one for a few years more.

My Dell XPS 15 is suffering from Windows Rot after only two years. When I get a free afternoon I'm going to have to back it all up and clean it out, hopefully avoid reinstalling from scratch. For all the negativity I've had towards OS X, at least it's better than that.

Re: The End of OS X

#277

Post by pier25 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #273

pier25 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main thing I miss is Spotlight search, but there are third party replacements for that. Such as? I've been looking for a decent launcher for Windows but all the options are pretty mediocre compared to Spotlight (or Alfred which is what I use).

Launchy[1] used to be good, but hasn't been updated in a decade. I'm not sure if it works in latest Windows 10. [1] https://www.launchy.net

Yeah... both Launchy and Wox are the ones that I tried.

Re: The End of OS X

#278

Post by _bxg1 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #210

_bxg1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is only free if your time has no value Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.

That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure FOSS folks may dislike the distribu…

Ironically, I first used it in 2010

It's definitely gotten better over the past decade, and maybe the jab is a little unfair if you're using off-the-shelf Ubuntu on very vanilla hardware. But that's mostly what I do when I use Linux, and yet I've never had it "just work" without several asterisks.

Sure, the mouse and keyboard just work. The display and network adapter (usually) just work. Audio may or may not just work. A second display may not play very nicely. Setting up GRUB/dual-booting always takes some effort to get it running smoothly enough for daily use. Installing my dev tools, there's always one random things that goes wrong. Sometimes I'll install my browser the wrong way and it doesn't get an icon in my launcher; so I have to go look up how to configure that manually. I still have this weird issue where whenever I boot Linux and then boot back to Windows, my system clock (in Windows) is off by 6 hours; I gave up trying to fix it because it wasn't worth the effort.

It's a death by a thousand cuts. I'm sure officially-supported installations like those on the XPS 13 work just fine, but if you're installing it yourself you're going to get pulled off track from what you were trying to do with your computer, and into forums trying to find someone else who had your exact issue. Some people revel in this experience, and I've been known to take a sense of accomplishment from it before, but most of the time I don't want to be messing with my computer, I want to be using it.

Re: The End of OS X

#279

Post by groby_b » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

wuunderbar wrote: post #255

cortesoft wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes. Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.

I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Seems like an easy way to screw up your OS installation. And it's not like a VM where you can rollback to a snapshot or relaunch. If there really was an issue there then you either need to file a bug and have them mainline a fix, or yes hack/shim a fix on top for your needs. Perhaps leveraging PATH precedence.

Apples open source devtools are old as dinosaurs, so that might be a common case.

But more importantly, it's the question whose laptop it is. I continue to think that the tools I build go to /usr/bin, because that's the way I like it. Apple is telling me I'm liking it wrong.

As for filing a bug with Apple - good one. Every single Apple dev considers radr:// a black hole, and the chance of getting a fix from Apple because of bugs filed (vs. Apple wants to fix it anyways) is slim to none.

Overall, Macs are more and more machines that want to prevent shooting yourself in the foot, at the price of less flexibility and access. This is a good choice for some, it's not a good choice for me. (And many other people who like hacking their machines)

Re: The End of OS X

#280

Post by jjcon » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #210

_bxg1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is only free if your time has no value Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.

That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure FOSS folks may dislike the distribu…

> but Linux seriously "just works" now

I agree it’s far better than it used to be but until I can install programs without having to crack open terminal I feel like it still has a ways to go.

The latest LTS version of the largest distro doesn’t even let you drag and drop to the desktop.