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The End of OS X

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Re: The End of OS X

#431

Post by boltzmann_brain »

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…

Yes, it's sad. Microsoft saw that quite a while ago and added WSL to Windows 10, hoping to lure non Windows developers and it seems to work. Windows 10 is bloated and has its own issues, but it's still a desktop first OS that I seem to prefer more and more than macOS. Well, personally I feel at home on Linux the most, but it's hard to get a solid Linux laptop sanctioned by the company.

Re: The End of OS X

#432

Post by nickv »

defnotashton2 wrote: post #101
peternicky wrote: post #33

I’ve been unhappy with macOS and Apple for the past few years and in January switched back to developing on a windows PC. I could not be happier with that decision and with the “roadmap” Apple provided yesterday, I expect it will be a long time before I go back to macOS, if ever.

I don't understand how you can get anything done without fighting windows nonsense proprietary tools.

What does that mean? Windows ships with an entire subsystem for Linux, you can literally install any linux distro you want and it will run native inside windows with access to each others file systems, ports, etc - with basically no performance penalty (that I see in WSL2).

It is more Linux than OS X is by orders of magnitude.

And at their last conference they previewed native X Windows support in Windows. So you can literally start gimp in Windows from a zsh shell inside Arch. Couple that with their new faux tiling window manager in Powertoys (FancyZones), VSCode, native docker and kubernetes support, NFS support, their new terminal, etc - developing in Windows from a unix perspective is way way way way better than OS X in modern times.

What proprietary tools are you talking about?

Re: The End of OS X

#433

Post by alacombe »

oneplane wrote: post #317
sailingparrot wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are not laptops, those are iPads, which weren't modular to begin with. Sorry, I thought this was illustrative enough to make my point, but if we have to be pendantic then here you go the exact same thing but with Macbooks: https://twitter.com/RDKLInc/status/1251533085734252549 > in my local area people don't eat or drink next to their devices Interesting local area you have there, at my office and all the off…

> https://twitter.com/RDKLInc/status/1251533085734252549 Again, two MacBooks and not millions, as explained in the twitter thread. Again, not defective but locked by the previous owner. Not even remotely related to 'right to repair'. As an owner, I want to be sure that when I lock a device, it's actually unusable to anyone else. So this is good (for me).

> As an owner, I want to be sure that when I lock a device, it's actually unusable to anyone else. So this is good (for me).

You want your data to be inaccessible. Not providing a way to factory-reset a perfectly functioning device (say, by replacing a modular storage) is just irresponsible.

Re: The End of OS X

#434

Post by cortesoft »

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.

I had other reasons that I needed my PATH to be in the order it was.

Re: The End of OS X

#435

Post by willtim »

fluffything wrote: post #406
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…

> and my downsides are... what exactly? I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years. I manage a bunch of Linux systems, from laptops to desktop to servers, and over the last 15 years I've probably spent months of my life setting up stuff that should have just worked. I use a mac at home and as my dev machine, because I charge quit…

This is anecdotal. My own anecdote is that we've had far more trouble with my wife's MacBook than my NixOS ThinkPad which just works, even after upgrades.

The Linux experience depends on the distribution, software and hardware you choose. You need to choose carefully.

Re: The End of OS X

#436

Post by willtim »

y7 wrote: post #288
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…

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really…

> The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried.

This is subjective. I think the MacOS UI looks and acts like a toy. My Linux machine has a solarised theme (I can toggle light/dark) with minimal window borders (i3, polybar). I think it's much more tasteful than MacOS. GNOME looks better too and it's themeable, unlike MacOS. But this is all of course just my opinion.

Re: The End of OS X

#437

Post by elipsey »

okamiueru wrote: post #421
elipsey wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus [...] I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?" I just plugged an extra ssd into my my old thinkpad yesterday. My boot volume is mSata. The hard drive hole was empty, a…

I have the exact same experience. I've developed on Windows, and for the past 10 years on Linux. The experience for the latter has changed so much in terms of usability that I struggle to understand why alternatives are at all desirable for developers. Out of necessity I had to do iOS development on OSX, and out of the gate that already leaves a bad impression. I can cross-compile and target anything from anywhere an…

>> I don't wish to struggle with technical limitations caused by politics and marketing decisions

So much this. When I depend on proprietary stuff, the care and feeding of licenses and serial numbers and all that stuff never seems to end, and it's shackled to one computer or host name or MAC address or something like that, which changes faster than calvinball.

It's not even about money. Who has time for all that busywork?

If mac platform was freely redistributable and Linux was proprietary, I would switch to mac in a heartbeat even if I hated using it, just to protect my time from doing all that IT stuff :p

Re: The End of OS X

#438

Post by danaris »

edjrage wrote: post #427
danaris wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "almost every browser" doesn't sync your saved passwords seamlessly between devices (mobile and desktop) with an end-to-end encrypted database, and automatically offer to autofill them, with the autofill itself protected by Touch ID/Face ID on the devices that support those.

For one, Bitwarden does all of that and more (I guess except the Face ID thing, but I don't really want that so I'd disable it anyway). It has web, mobile and desktop apps, and browser extensions. All available in the free plan. Oh, and it's open source and self-hostable. https://bitwarden.com/ (Not affiliated with it, just a pretty happy (free) user!)

Neat, and glad to know about it! I've actually been surprised (and a little frustrated) that there haven't been any alternatives to iCloud Keychain for genuine seamless, e2e encrypted, password management.

Does it actually work the same as Mobile Safari's interface on iOS? Automatically presenting options both for creating and autofilling passwords on webpages? (If it can do that in iOS Firefox, I might consider it...I've been using desktop Firefox for a while because of some bizarre idiosyncratic issues I have with Safari on my laptop, that I can't reproduce anywhere else, but are extremely irritating where they do happen...)

Re: The End of OS X

#439

Post by duskwuff »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #391
duskwuff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the Blue Meanies were simply the System 7 core developers, not a HIG-specific group.

I recall them as the HIG group. I first encountered it at MacHack, in 1987, or so. There were a couple of HIG engineers, there, and they referred to themselves that way. The reason was, because they insisted that app developers follow HIG guidelines.

Are you sure? The story I've always heard is that the Blue (Mac OS) vs. Pink (Taligent) team split originated in a planning meeting around 1988, and the "Blue Meanies" were core members of the Blue team.

Re: The End of OS X

#440

Post by ByteJockey »

TwoBit wrote: post #353
fsflover wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).

In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.

It really does depend on the hardware.

Thinkpads usually work really well out of the box (even the nipple mouse works without a hitch).

I have plenty of horror stories about other computers though. Usually involving being deep in some page tree on a company's website that they don't seem to have actually expected anyone to go to, trying to figure out which specific vendor id maps to the actual hardware I have.

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