The End of OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of OS X

#461

Post by mark_l_watson » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #340

mark_l_watson wrote: post #100

Before leaving on my morning hike, I cleaned up some storage, getting 50G free on my MacBook, and downloaded the 9G installer while I was hiking. It turns out that I was still about 12G short in required disk space. I mention this to save other people from lost effort. A question: lots of my 256G of storage is taken up by remote mobile storage in ~/Library. If there an easy way to tell macOS to temporarily not keep l…

Did you happen to have Time Machine enabled? (To answer your question, I think what you're looking for is brctl evict.)

I deleted ~/.stack and ~/.mvn and had plenty of room. I usually do Haskell dev on a very fast VPS anyway.

I am running the macOS Big Sur beta and also the iPadOS 14 beta. Things seem to run slowly on my MacBook, but ti seems like some work is done the first time apps are opened. My $3400 Common Lisp kit does not work on the Big Sur beta, so I will probably revert in a few days, but I am having fun with the beta right now.

I have had no problems with the iPadOS 14 beta so far.

Re: The End of OS X

#462

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #178

sudosysgen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. A new application you have needs more RAM. Your battery is not holding up very well and you want to replace it. Your SSD will fail soon and you want to replace it. I had every single one of those issues on a laptop, and fixing them cost me from 25$ to 100$, about a fifth of what the Apple Store or OEM was quoting me. Instead of being without my laptop for a week or two, I got all of them over in an hour and a h…

Your scenario definitely exists, but it also doesn't hit the likes of the user you respond to as much as you might expect. SSD's don't fail the way they used to, RAM requirements don't change as much as it used to and while batteries do die, at this time I've seen more people switch machines before any of that happens. The last time I wanted or needed to replace memory or storage in a laptop must have been 7 years ag…

Why are there so many Apple devices with 8GB RAM for sale on eBay then? The RAM prices for new Apple devices are 3x the normal rate so people get disappointed with all the Electron apps eating RAM and sell it!

Re: The End of OS X

#463

Post by ByteJockey » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #133

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed. I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists. Can't really ignore it anymore.…

My solution is to just use Spotlight Search to launch everything. My hands are on the keyboard much more than a mouse or touchpad, and it's a good habit for when I switch between the laptop (where the touchpad is more convenient) and a desktop setup where they're more physically separated. Hunting for things on a screen with a cursor is tedious and annoying to me, when I can always just type it. But maybe that's a ha…

Spotlight search is one of the only patterns I really took away from using a mac for work.

I even mapped Super (win key) + Space to the application finder in XFCE. It's just muscle memory at this point, just like the vim keybindings.

And, really, any excuse to use the mouse less is a win.

Re: The End of OS X

#464

Post by sergeykish » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

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…

"Power user" may be as much as changing Windows Theme. Not much is allowed so bar is not high. Through the page again and again "users don't care".

Linux changes expectations. Everything is possible, there should be package for that, deconstruct, throw away, replace, and most of the time someone already did it.

Re: The End of OS X

#465

Post by chipotle_coyote » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #377

warent wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also consider myself to be a power user. However, one huge annoying problem I've encountered is sharing homebrew between multiple users. It seems like it's not possible for homebrew and all of it's libraries/binaries to be owned/usable by more than one user at a time. Apple should roll their own package management tool or officially support homebrew.

The homebrew developers (of the homebrew framework itself not all the random app maintainers) have been "doing it wrong since day one. It is utterly and unforgivably wrong to install system-wide binaries owned by a normal user outside of the users own home dir. That's what they were doing for years until fairly recently when Apple had to simply change the os to break their install, forcing brew to change it, finally,…

> It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew, after having previously switched from Fink to MacPorts many years ago despite not only being told but having actually experienced that Homebrew was slower and more fragile. And the reason was not "the more fun name." The reason was that both MacPorts and Fink were incredibly slow at expanding and updating their ports tree. Stuff that I knew from my Linux and FreeBSD days, or cool stuff that I read about on weblogs or in places like Slashdot and HN, was nearly always right there in a current or new-current version in Homebrew. That was rarely true of MacPorts: often it wasn't there at all, and if it was, it was often several minor or even a full major version behind.

This may have changed since then -- I hope it has, since I suspect it's been over a decade at this point -- but IIRC, the last straw was trying to install the terminal version of a program (either Emacs or Vim, I think) that also had a GUI version available and, after going to make coffee and coming back to the computer, discovering MacPorts (a) didn't care that I had explicitly asked for the terminal version, it was going to install the GUI version for me anyway, and (b) because of MacPorts' aggressive "never depend on the system version of anything no way no how", it was building a new version of the entire bleeping XFree86 from source for me. Yes, I understand why MacPorts takes that "no system dependencies" approach; yes, I get that was probably a badly-specified port file. But I ripped it out and never looked back.

Well, I take that back. I think I looked back once, about four years ago, to see if everything that I had installed under Homebrew on a machine could be installed with MacPorts, because maybe it was time to give it another chance. The answer was no, everything could not be installed. So the answer was no, it was not time to go back.

I don't care that Homebrew has a fun name. I care that it has the stuff that I want kept reasonably current with upstream versions. Homebrew has, as far as I can tell, gotten a lot better over the years at not being fragile. It's still no speed demon, but the truth is that I don't actually run it that often. If a more native macOS package for a given piece of software is available, I'll install that in preference.

Re: The End of OS X

#466

Post by adolfojp » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

gavinray wrote: post #378

y7 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everything on Ubuntu just works, too.

Except for fractional scaling if you use the proprietary NVIDIA driver. This was an issue on the latest LTS release.

Re: The End of OS X

#467

Post by francoisp » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #195

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 used to use macOS because it was a Unix that looked good and just worked, but both observations have become less and less true with time. In that same time, Linux really caught up and diverged such that it offers features in its kernel, like cgroups and kernel namespaces, that macOS doesn't match, leaving me to feel as if the old FreeBSD roots of macOS are less of a perk and more of a kludge in 2020. Today, I run L…

What flavor or unix if I may ask? Do you have driver issues?TIA! Cheers.

Re: The End of OS X

#468

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #407

sudosysgen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling desktop software to Linux users is only unprofitable because it often sucks and when it doesn't the market share isn't there. Have you ever seen anyone actually pay for Windows or Mac OS? No? right.

Plenty of times actually, that is why they sell Windows OEM CDs and macOS used to be sold on stores as well.

They basically sold recovery keys.

As far as Windows, 95% of the people I know pirated Windows. The only people that buy windows are enterprises.

Re: The End of OS X

#469

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

hundchenkatze wrote: post #344

sudosysgen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>inux is only free if your time has no value. I use it as a server OS plenty, but don’t really need it on my desktop. To me this means "I don't know how to get Ubuntu working". Even Arch Linux requires less maintenance for me than my 2013 Macbook Pro did. As soon as you get the setup over with correctly you never have an issue, unless you can't get set it up correctly. Windows is nice when everything works, and if y…

Your argument doesn't really prove anything, you can just flip it around: Linux is nice when everything works, and if you don't do anything too advanced for your setup and never have an issue it's good. But fixing issues is much easier in Windows than Linux as long as you know what you are doing. Anything will be easier to do "as long as you know what you are doing."

But it's not. Windows is not an open operating system, many of the issues simply cannot be fixed and the only solution is to basically reinstall Windows. The error codes are often opaque and there is a ton of the time no documentation as to what's happening behind the scenes. Whereas on Linux I've never ran across an issue whose official solution was a reinstall.

Re: The End of OS X

#470

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #392

oneplane wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle? I've seen it less and less over the last 6 years and the last 2 years it hasn't happened in any work setting. I know people like to have the feeling of control (do you really control your laptop if you can't replace your EC, CSME, AGESA, SSD FW, NIC FW, VBIOS) and the concept of shuffling parts around, but the need for that (a…

> On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle? I've upgraded hard drives and RAM on very single Mac I've ever owned, except the last Mac I purchased, a 2015 MBP, where it wasn't an option. It's looking like this one will be literally the last Mac I purchase. Apple's practice of charging premium, bespoke prices for commodity hardware was insulting, but at least there was…

Same here. My 2012 MBP has been upgraded with more RAM and a SSD and the battery is replaceable (but it's lasted better than my work 2017 model and is healthier!) but the cost of the new devices is so astronomical it'll be the last one I buy. Since I will have to invest in a new ARM device just to develop for their new platform, it's goodbye Mac and back to Linux (already got Windows as a side Dev machine).