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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

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Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#81

Post by kitsunesoba »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #69
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #16

>Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close. That's astounding. Finder must be awful. To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in general.

Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago. Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem f…

In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future:

- You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too)

- You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G

- Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs)

Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#82

Post by boogies »

burlesona wrote: post #41

Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.

> Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#83

Post by totesraunch »

akra wrote: post #70
smoldesu wrote: post #35

>apt-get was a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is still the best way to manage software today. brew is a mediocre replacement. While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". Brew has distilled…

People state consistent shortcut mapping is an advantage of using Mac but after 2 years of being required to use a Macbook Pro I'm not really sure about that - often they are more complicated IMO. I still miss built in Linux and Windows key mappings. For example Windows + Left to move the window on the left side of screen for side by side apps on the same screen. Great for remote demo's and coding sessions. Ctrl + Sh…

There is a great app for your window move/resize issue called Moom.

You can bind keys and mouse to window move/resize actions.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#84

Post by PurpleFoxy »

symlinkk wrote: post #53
burlesona wrote: post #41

Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.

GNOME has this feature

It does and it mostly works but it doesn’t seem to be as fast as on macOS.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#85

Post by na85 »

darkandbrooding wrote: post #80
xtian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Homebrew a failure? I don’t generally have issues with it for my needs.

There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.) Hypothet…

Does apt solve that problem? If so, how?

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#86

Post by kitsunesoba »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #84
symlinkk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME has this feature

It does and it mostly works but it doesn’t seem to be as fast as on macOS.

Not sure how GNOME's preview feature is written, but macOS QuickLook plugins are written in C, C++, or Objective-C and the plugins included with the OS leverage OpenCL (or maybe Metal now) to accelerate rendering of previews, which is part of why it's so fast.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#87

Post by Wowfunhappy »

messe wrote: post #61
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?

> takes control of /usr/local/ for itself In fairness, so does ports/pkg/pkg_add on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.

They require sudo to install stuff though, right?

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#88

Post by laurencerowe »

na85 wrote: post #85
darkandbrooding wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.) Hypothet…

Does apt solve that problem? If so, how?

Homebrew is like running Debian unstable, the world underneath you is currently changing.

Mac OS itself doesn’t really have this problem since applications can bundle the exact version of their required frameworks, a bit like Ubuntu Snaps.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#89

Post by addicted »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #58
burlesona wrote: post #41

Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.

The ability to extend QuickLook to support more types is huge too. If it can be rendered to a static image or HTML page it can have a QuickLook plugin written for it.

QuickLook is great. And the plugins are fantastic. I remember when I used to have a Mac there was a QL a plug-in that allowed you to peek into and browse Zip/Rar/DMG files.

That was so useful at a time where my workflow included multiple zip files containing assignments etc. Being able to simply hit spacebar to look into them, instead of decompressing and creating a new folder was incredible.

And if I’m not mistaken, the same plugin also allowed spotlight to then search the contents of the zip files.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#90

Post by mceachen »

boogies wrote: post #82
burlesona wrote: post #41

Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.

> Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).

Editing PDFs and sticking your signature on documents is trivial with Preview.app. Save-as-PDF is broken (edits don't show up reliably), but you can easily just print to PDF to work around that bug.

I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great if either worked, but I haven't looked into it.

(FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes are on my desk too. PDF-related tasks are the only other reason why I turn to my Mac.)

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