The End of OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of OS X

#471

Post by oneplane » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

alacombe wrote: post #433

oneplane wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, I want my device to only be usable to me unless I say otherwise. When I sell it I'll sell it unlocked.

Re: The End of OS X

#472

Post by potta_coffee » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

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…

I switched to Ubuntu for work about a year ago, I've done zero fiddling since the day I set it up. Linux has really come a long way even in the last 5 years, IMO. I still have a 2015 MBP that I use for my personal work and it's still solid.

Re: The End of OS X

#473

Post by potta_coffee » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

willtim wrote: post #436

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…

> 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.

I agree. I dislike the Mac UI, particularly Finder. The one Mac tool I use and love is the screenshot shortcuts. Other than that, 99% of my time is spent in the terminal and Sublime Text, and Firefox.

Re: The End of OS X

#474

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #469

hundchenkatze wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever read Windows Internals? Or MSDN? It has more documentation than any Linux system, ever. Even Microsoft's documentation of Apple's SDKs is better than Apple's. Windows Internals books are extremely extremely detailed.

I've ran Windows since 3.11 and have never ever had to reinstall Windows to fix things. Perhaps you should take a look at Event Viewer in more detail to see why things are broken.

Re: The End of OS X

#475

Post by 0x0 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

cdelsolar wrote: post #114

0x0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, what a modern desktop is sorely lacking right now is protecting users and developers from themselves. Whenever I run "npm install" I have to close my eyes and ignore the chills down my spine thinking about how a thousand random npmjs.org account holders just ran their postinstall scripts on my computer with full access to ~/Documents/. The traditional multi-user Unix permission system is no longer…

i don't understand your point about random npm account holders running their scripts on your computer?

When you npm install a single package like vue or react, it drags in a dependency tree that sources a thousand random npmjs packages. Each of these packages may specify a postinstall script that executes at install time. Time and time again, some random leftpad-like dependency might lurk five directories deep and spring a surprise script on you, either because the author is malicious, or they handed over (or sold out) to someone else, or perhaps most likely their npmjs account was simply compromised.

Re: The End of OS X

#476

Post by sergeykish » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #372

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…

I've been running Linux on Macs since my 2005 12" PowerBook. There were a couple years in the middle here I switched to OS X with Linux running in a VM due to hardware support issues (the VM was a pain in the ass to use; there were no end to performance problems). I never liked OS X as an OS all that much. It was fine, but I found it got in my way more than it helped me. In 2016, after getting tired of various hardwa…

You are quite persistent on Mac hardware. Why?

It is hostile platform, it should be rough. I use 14" Dell Latitude - no problems at all, beautiful machine. Probably would stay on it or try Asus ZenBook.

Re: The End of OS X

#477

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:00 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).

Everything from voidtools.com is a great search tool.

Re: The End of OS X

#478

Post by oneplane » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #402

oneplane wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you call open and what the 'opposite' you refer to is. Open as in 'welcoming to users'? Open as in 'it has hinges on the device that open'? Open means many things. If you refer to Open Source in terms of the OSI, then no, macOS is not that kind of open. It's also not entirely closed as there is plenty of 1-to-1 source code available, also under OSI-approved licenses (but not all of it). If you refer t…

Apple for example refused to support Vulkan and don't allow anyone else to provide drivers for it. It means they have control over what features you can use - you have no say in it. Even Windows being as closed as it is doesn't have such restrictions. So I'd say macOS is closed to a sickening level and it's completely disingenuous to call it open. May be if you compare it to iOS which is closed in even worse ways, yo…

That's a rather extremistic view. Apple doesn't support vulkan because they tried to get OpenGL and OpenCL working. Nvidia didn't play ball and AMD wasn't in the picture back then. The result was that Apple had to come up with something else (Metal) and that has worked out great with them.

But unless you are writing a graphics engine (which almost no user does) that doesn't even matter.

Regarding your openness, you still haven't provided with a description as to what you describe as open or closed. Is Windows open? No. None of it is, except a few example apps and things like the calculator. You don't get kernel sources, you don't get library sources, and you can't run any custom versions. With macOS you can.

Same goes for DirectX if you want to stay with graphics stacks (Direct 3D to be more specific). That's about as closed as it gets: you can't remove it, you can't use it elsewhere, you can't get the sources and you can't modify it.

You can still run Vulkan on macOS if you want -- you are free to implement it, run it, make shims or layers if you wish etc, just not with Apple's support.

What you call open or closed isn't clear, but the fact that you use the word 'rotten' signals to me that you are emotional about it and probably not really looking for a discussion.

Re: The End of OS X

#479

Post by linuxhansl » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:16 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…

I feel like I'm posting the same thing comment over and over again over the past few weeks. :)

I've been using Linux on Laptops since the last 90s, on a variety of Thinkpads. T42, T500, T440p, X1E gen2

Yes, 10 or 15 years ago you had to fiddle a lot, I mostly even compiled my own customized Kernels.

This was mostly due the hardware manufacturer not releasing specs for anything, so you had to fiddle around that.

At some point I stopped compiling my own Kernels, it wasn't needed anymore, but there was still a bunch of software I wanted and compiled from source. Then that too became less and less, since what I need is now typically shipped with the distributions (I've been using Fedora).

Then it required fiddling with the video drivers to support dual video cards (Intel and NVidia). No longer needed. Now you just add the rpmfusion repos and install the drivers.

Everything just works. (New network printers or other devices are detected, the right drivers found, etc, etc.)

Cutting edge hardware (perhaps laptops releases within the last 1/2 year or so) sometimes still gives problems.

With Lenovo actually shipping Linux with its new laptops even that will no longer be a problem - at least with these laptops.

In addition, if you want to, you can know what's going on if you use Linux.

In fact I find myself getting annoyed with both MacOS and Windows (when I look at problems on my friends' machines). Everything is so opaque.

Re: The End of OS X

#480

Post by oneplane » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #404

oneplane wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example if I run something that can take advantage of AVX512 and my current CPU doesn't have that but a new CPU does. Same goes for TB2 vs. TB3, very useful when you want to connect an external GPU. It does work on Thunderbolt 2 but the extra bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is a nice improvement. Say you change your workload model there might be ~20% improvements between bare metal, virtual machines and containers. If…

> For example if I run something that can take advantage of AVX512 and my current CPU doesn't have that but a new CPU does. Same goes for TB2 vs. TB3, very useful when you want to connect an external GPU. It does work on Thunderbolt 2 but the extra bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 is a nice improvement. This is definitely an echo-chamber/bubble point of view. The vast majority of users out there don't even know or care wha…

Seems you are responding to the wrong thread here. User the_af was asking me why I replace a machine and I answered with some reasons specific to me. This was a deeper dive in to the point that some people don't need to upgrade at all because they don't do anything different between day 1 of their usage or day 1780. And they don't need to because the laptops of the last decade don't fall apart as much as they used to and a Mac specifically tends to work well during its entire lifecycle. This is also why there aren't as much people interested in modifying their computers mid-lifecycle.

While I bet that there are a lot of people that do want to modify their systems, they are such a minority that it's not very logical for a large multinational to invest in that to the detriment of other goals. It might simply mean that you are not the target audience for their product(s).

Some other manufacturers/brands have the same, while others do a mixed portfolio to cater to smaller groups as well. We also have large manufacturers that cater to the classical enterprises which still run on the old idea that you need a fleet of identical machines and then swap out parts all day long, so machines that have facilities for that exist. Most notably Lenovo, HP and Dell do that.