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The End of OS X

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Re: The End of OS X

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing the hardware or software yourself is not the point. The point is the monopoly of the manufacturer to repair and modify with huge negative consequences. The lack of right to modify the software leads to unjust power over users [0,1], while the lack of ability to repair hardware leads to unreasonable repair prices, monopoly and environmental damage [2]. [0] https://www.defectivebydesign.org/ [1] https://www.gn…

No, that isn't the point either. The point is happy users, and there will always be some unhappy users because they wanted to do something that isn't supported or actively barred. Throwing in words like 'right' and 'unjust' helps in movements and call to action etc, but in this context it's about someone turning on their device, doing some work, and turning it off again.

Those "happy" users are just ignorant users who don't know what to do with their money. Their happiness wouldn't be any lesser if Apple would provide ways to fix their laptops.

You should watch Louis Rossmann who is doing repairs, how purposefully Apple makes any repairs hard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uYUB8DZH2M&t=2649s

Re: The End of OS X

#572
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Homebrew works pretty nicely It always surprises me when people cite homebrew as a plus rather than a minus in these discussions. Compared to the experience I have with Linux package managers, I've found homebrew to be extraordinarily slow even at the best of times. A simple "brew update" will generally take at least 30 seconds; in that time on something like pacman, I'll usually not only have already finished…

While Homebrew is absolutely slow, the experience of package management on macOS (homebrew gets you bleeding-edge versions of the crap you install, whereas Apple manages the system and keeps it stable) is IMO better than Linux where the choice of stable vs. bleeding-edge is systemwide.

Obviously requires significant setup, but this[1] seems to solve the issue you are talking about on linux.

[1] https://bedrocklinux.org/

Re: The End of OS X

#573
post #372

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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.

Good experiences with the ZenBook line here. Pop!_OS worked out of the box with everything but the fingerprint reader, including the Optimus GPU.

Re: The End of OS X

#574
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. 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 "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…

There are no good mail clients for Linux that I can find. All of them are great, except for one or two things that makes them completely awful.

> (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer).

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Safari is holding back the web because despite its monopoly on users it doesn't support new technologies? That's not true at all. Especially because it's got such a small market share, it should be up to them to deliver what they feel makes the most sense, and let the market decide the rest (though sadly the market seems to keep using Chrome, which is terrible).

Honest question though: as a Safari user almost exclusively for the past 15 years, what I missing out on that I could have experienced if Safari had supported WebGL2? I don't know that I've encountered any sites or use cases where Safari was holding me back in that regard, but I'm curious to know what was out there that I couldn't see before.

Re: The End of OS X

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cutting files is generally bad UX Says who? Apple? Where was it established to be "bad ux"? 30 years using it on Windows and have yet to find anything awkward about cutting files.

Because on Windows the functionality is semantically inconsistent. When you cut text you are removing it from one place and pasting it into another. As soon as you choose the action the text disappears. When you cut a file nothing happens to the file unless you paste it somewhere - and for good reason, it would be insanity for a file to disappear in a similar manner and when the majority of uses for this function are…

Text on buffers are disposable (e.g. cut/pasting text) but files are not, as losing one can even be a tragedy without backup so I don't see much logic in treating them the same, specially since the mental overhead becomes a burden to the user (oh I'm pasting a file so I must remember to use the special command to cut a file) instead of putting the burden on the machine, specially since reducing mental overhead is arguably the sole purpose of the machine.

And the focus of that complain was that the edit menu does not clarify in any way that the "Cut" command there is only meant for text, it should be renamed "Cut text" or something that the user can easily understand to be intended only for text.

Re: The End of OS X

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have to say that I 100% do not believe this statement. You mean you you've never used any wireless connections to your machine? You've never had to set up backups or change audio settings? You've never had to deal with setting up one thing in 15 years? Since when did OSX gain the ab…

His claim is he did it 15 years ago, and never had to touch anything else since. Definitely a stretch, but quite believable. Just a few days ago I had to figure out how to reinstall Nvidia driver after Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 upgrade. And the damn thing still shows my primary screen panned whenever I log off/log back on. I was glad to return to Windows when the Linux-specific issue was solved.

I've got a stock Ubuntu 18.04 install at work. Sometimes, but not always, it hangs for three minutes or so trying to run fsck on my UEFI partition. Other times, I'm at the login screen within a minute of turning it on.

When it hangs, it finally exits with an error message saying it couldn't mount /boot/efi. Once I log in I can see that /boot/efi is mounted fine.

A bunch of my applications hang all the time for reasons I couldn't figure out. Turns out they were trying to communicate with my Gnome keychain over D-Bus, but they were in a separate D-Bus session so they just sent their D-Bus message and then waited for however long until they gave up. No idea at what point this started happening or why, but I never did figure out how to fix it (other than disabling those apps from being able to store passwords securely).

If I used the Intel drivers for my Intel GPU I got extreme stuttering and tearing, which only went away when I uninstalled the Intel drivers entirely so that it would use the "correct" drivers.

Then there's snaps. I install stuff and sometimes it's a package, and sometimes it's a snap. If it's a snap, everything turns into a giant mess. I had Firefox saving its downloads to Skype's workspace for some reason, multiple Firefox profiles on my system in various places, multiple versions of Firefox running when snapd downloaded a new version and symlinked it to be the default, two copies of Telegram for some reason and no obvious way to tell which was which, a snap and non-snap version of things because the Store installed the snap but another package depended on the apt package, and so on.

I installed my system on btrfs because "it's like a decade old now, it should be fine right?" and within a month my filesystem had been completely corrupted and I had to reinstall entirely (though I managed to salvage most of my home directory at least).

This is all stuff I'm willing to tolerate to some extent, but I can't think of a single thing that Linux offers me that makes it worth all this hassle. At my last job, I happily used a MacBook for nine straight years, and I never lost an entire day of productivity just because suddenly my system won't boot, or dealt with graphical glitches in every app because the driver for my video card isn't the right driver for my video card, or lost data because one of the default options for installation filesystem is unstable and unreliable.

I've never had to do much of anything to "tweak" MacOS unless I wanted to; on Ubuntu, I have to do it almost every day to get something working well (or at all).

So I'm gonna go ahead and say that yeah, MacOS isn't even remotely dead, and it's certainly not going to lose to Linux any time soon.

Re: The End of OS X

#577
post #372
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…

On my 2011 MacBook Pro I have run various Linux distributions since 2013. Mostly debian and now solus. Both have been a joy. I have not experienced the same issues that you describe. All my hardware just works out of the box.

Re: The End of OS X

#578
post #278
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> 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.

I fixed this in pretty quickly after install. The reason for the issue is that your Linux machine uses UTC to store time on the hardware clock whereas Windows uses the local timezone. The solution is to either let windows use UTC or Linux use local time.

In my case I went with Windows on UTC based on this link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_time#UTC_in_Wind...

Hope that helps

Re: The End of OS X

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and my downsides are... what exactly Less cohesion, competing GUI libs/configuration systems/etc, still not 100% GPU support, the Wayland situation, almost non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options (not to mention support for peripherals like audio interfaces), and being at the worse than Apple's arbitrary mercy of your favourite desktop environment programmers (e.g. abrupt transitions and bizarro decisions in…

> still not 100% GPU support I'm a graphics engineer so I'm not sure I understand this argument. When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs. > Non-existent multimedia (video, audio) options This... is simply not true (?) Also, regarding Gnome/KDE, I dislike both and don't use either. Something like i3 with zero-to-know configuration is already pre…

>When I talk about weaker and worse-performing hardware options and drivers on Mac, I'm referring _mainly_ to GPUs.

And when I talk about weaker support for GPUs on Linux, I mean the Wayland / compositor situation, getting 3D to work without planning what specific model of laptop to buy to use with what specific distro, and so on...

>This... is simply not true (?)

This is simply true. It can't run Cubase, Logic (ok, that's expected), Pro Tools, Studio One, Reason, FL Studio, Maschine, and tons of other things besides. Your best bet is some niche players like BitWig and Traktion, or crossing your fingers with Wine... And let's not get started for drivers for professional audio interfaces and peripherals...

Same for NLEs...

Re: The End of OS X

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked as a Windows sysadmin. I'm familiar with Windows Internals and Sysinternals. But when the bootloader decides it's going to go into automatic repair or now or when the indexer decides that it needs to use 100% of your HDD for the next year, there's nothing you can do about it but reinstall. When some Windows services will fail exclusively if your locale is set to French, there's also no explanation, and the l…

Perhaps I have not had these problems because my locale is UK English.

I've used Windows for decades and it has been very stable for me for the past 7+ years.

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