Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Impressions from a first-time Mac user

loganmarchione.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 756 posts

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#121

Post by smoldesu »

bombcar wrote: post #97
smoldesu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But stand-alone programs? Not even things like Photoshop, I'm talking something written by someone and you want to install it? That's not as compatible with the Linux method There's definitely some room for improvement here, but fwiw you can double-click executables on Linux to run them just like you would on Windows (or to an extent, MacOS). I think the "solution" here is not to rely on portable software, and when…

Yeah, homebrew isn't the greatest by any means, but it seems to have more stuff and more people use it than fink or macports anymore, so usually there's a workaround somewhere. The MacOS "app bundle" is a really cute solution to the installation/library problem, and I wish something like it had caught on in the Linux world. It seems AppImage is heading this way.

App bundles are neat, but when given the option of "an app directory on top of a traditional Unix filesystem layout" or "everything is packages", I'll tend to choose the latter. It might just be an impasse situation; I think the ideas of package management are developed about as far as they can go, even newcomers like Flatpak can't really bring anything new to the table. The only package manager that's impressed me in recent years is Nix. I think if most developers decided to throw their weight behind Nix packages, we could live in the "it just works" utopia that Linux and Mac developers alike have been dreaming of for years.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#122

Post by major505 »

I`m in a similar situation working as a android developer the company sended me a macpro 2021 with the infamous touch bar.

Diferent from the author I had some previous experience with macbooks, since I did had a Macbook white many years ago, and have some vintage apple computers like a clamshell laptop and a G4 (I just think they are neat).

While I`m in no way as productive with it as I`m with my thinkpad runing Fedora there`s some mitigation I was able to do.

The main wone with the window manager. While I do think Apple full screen works well when working exclusive with the mac screen, when connected to multiple screens is a pain in the ass.

In this case Magnet solved my problems since it looks a lot with the Windows / Gnome way of dividing the screen with multiple applications.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#123

Post by IncRnd »

loganmarchione wrote: post #9
rwc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it's right or wrong, but the behavior dates back to the very first implementations of Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS has always been an application switching interface, and Windows has been a window switching interface. Takes getting used to the paradigm shift.

OP here. I like this perspective, I never thought about it this way!

FYI, I always load Rectangle on my Macs for window snapping using keyboard keys. It's fantastic!

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#124

Post by als0 »

> While macOS isn’t POSIX-certified, it is Single Unix Specification UNIX 03 registered and compliant.

This sounds wrong. Isn’t POSIX a mandatory subset of the Single Unix Specification? Hence it is inherently certified.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#125

Post by IncRnd »

brimble wrote: post #107
divbzero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I miss most in macOS is Super + Left and Super + Right to tile windows left and right..

I've used Spectacle with the defaults, for years. It's not actively developed but still works. There are actively-maintained alternatives, but since it has zero times done anything weird or glitchy for me, even with multiple monitors, I've not switched yet. "brew install spectacle", start it, give it accessibility permissions it needs in the Settings panel, set to start at login (check a checkbox in Spectacle's setti…

I used Spectable as well. The newer version is called Rectangle.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#126

Post by rconti »

mattnewton wrote: post #15
ghostpepper wrote: post #12

The window management grips are fair, although I don't find Cmd + ` to be particularly burdensome - it's right above tab on the keyboard, and my KDE Plasma desktop behaves the exact same way.

I don't know any Mac users who don't primarily use expose (or is it mission control now? The thing where it tiles all your windows open and you click the right one). Agree that windows should snap even when not fullscreened but I think expose solves this one better if you hand is already on the trackpad / mouse

I don't use it, in fact I thought it was mostly abandoned.

I hate window snapping behavior. I use rectangle, but cannot for the life of me figure out why it makes sense to snap a window to fullscreen on my 40" ultrawide the instant I get a window somewhere near any side of my monitor. Who works like this? You have to just leave a window floating in space if you don't want it fullscreened?

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#127

Post by nerdjon »

olyjohn wrote: post #115
nerdjon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Mac changed its default settings? The Dock shows you any minimized windows on the right. If for some reason this is no longer default (I don't remember the last time I setup a new Mac and didn't carry over settings) Right Click the dock >> dock preferences >> Uncheck "Minimize windows into application icon"

Well, that did work. But now I just have a massive pile of minimized window icons... and still no keyboard shortcut to switch to them.

I guess like the other person mentioned I just don't find myself minimizing that often on Mac.

That being said there is an option. The first is if you are in an application you can do control-down or (if you enable it under gestures >> more gestures for your trackpad) you do 3 fingers down you will see the minimized windows for your current application at the bottom. I did also just look it up and apparently if you do cmd-tab and press up on an application it does the same thing.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but you can at least do it on a per application level for anything minimized.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#128

Post by colinmhayes »

danaris wrote: post #111
colinmhayes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure macOS was designed to have every window in fullscreen 100% of the time and the user would three finger swipe to switch windows. Seems like having a shitty experience when trying to do anything besides fullscreen is kind of the point, "do things the way we want you to or suffer."

No, it was actually designed to never have any window in fullscreen. That behavior is a relatively recent addition to the macOS windowing model.

Ok I'll rephrase. I'm pretty sure that apple redesigned their entire windowing system and related shortcuts around 100% fullscreen when they implemented full screen windows. Every short cut seems to be built with full screen windows in mind, especially the track pad stuff. Even the snapping that op complained about makes sense when considered through the 100% full screen paradigm.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#129

Post by smoldesu »

correct_horse wrote: post #112
ysleepy wrote: post #87

My recommendations for Mac Users: * Put the Dock left or right, vertical space is precious (trust me, do it for a week and then decide) * Setup Hot-Corners (Settings -> Mission Control -> Hot Corners) - Upper-Right Corner as Mission Control (Must be upper right so spaces are immediately shown) - Lower-Left Corner as Application Windows - just fling your mouse curser into the corner (use std. gestures on the trackpad)…

> Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot tho…

It's really abysmal. I had a similar situation: every time I'd pull a monorepo, my machine would be flooded with "mdworker" processes. The CPU would spin up and the machine would operate at 85c for a few hours before finally cooling down. The culprit was Spotlight, and the solution was to disable search indexing.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#130

Post by brimble »

spicyusername wrote: post #28

> Package management This always floors me when I have to use a non-Linux computer. The difference between package management on Linux and other OSes is shocking. Dnf, Yum, Pacman are all so convenient and straightforward. I can't understand why Windows and MacOS don't have anything official that fills this gap.

Linux user for years before switching to Mac.

I prefer Brew to every Linux package manager I've used.

I like that it's totally separate from the base OS.

I like the insanely large package selection, including binary [edit: that is, closed-source binary] packages. I almost never install any tool that's not in Homebrew—usually I just blindly try it, and sure enough, I got the package name right and it does have it, and it installs no problem. Gentoo's Portage and Arch's whatever-they-call-it are pretty close, but those are... higher touch operating systems, to put it mildly (I was a heavy Gentoo user for a few years—I know Arch is less of a pain than that, but it's still got rolling-distro and various DIY rough edges)

I don't try to use it to install development dependencies like some people seem to. It's not good for that, but doing that on Linux isn't a great idea, either. Your project should manage its own deps separate from your development system, or you're gonna have a bad time sooner or later, unless you are only deploying to exactly the system config that you're developing on.

Post reply on HN