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Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

shkspr.mobi

331–340 of 740 posts

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#331
post #313

Seems like the obvious tradeoffs you'd expect, mostly lack of control/ability to change things, which I'd expect of MacOS. In return you get stability, Apples locked down approach means the OS is far more predictable. Linux in my view takes the reverse approach, you lose stability relative to MacOS in exchange for complete control. Historically Windows has sat somewhere in the middle, though in recent years with all…

And airdrop. I could never live without airdrop again. It’s really annoying actually as I want to try the folding phones from samsung but they don’t have airdrop…

I'm not familiar with AirDrop, but KDE Connect can easily send files between the desktop and and Android phone.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#332

I wonder if the OP has switched from Windows to Linux initially. And did he write a piece complaining that everything isn't exactly how they're used to then? A lot of "i'd switch but" articles - in all directions - basically come down to "the destination doesn't work how i'm used to". Even though they're fundamentally as crappy in the background. When someone asks me why I use Mac OS as my main desktop I answer "it's…

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I'm happily using Windows now but used a Mac before and it took a long time for me to realise that my complaints about Windows largely boiled down to "it doesn't do things in the way that I'm used to". With that said, whilst I do like macOS overall I always found it infuriating how on macOS applications could steal focus. Something I do appreciate on Windows is that focus stea…

In KDE one can set the focus stealability. That used to be a terrible paper cut for me, but now I haven't even thought about it in years.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While technically, yes, you are correct. It kinda misses the point - developers are more and more working with containers. Doing this on a Mac is an awful experience compared to doing it on Linux (or, Windows - I hear docker + WSL2 is pretty decent - but I've not tried it!)

I understand the point and totally agree, but in my opinion it doesn't fit to this kind of list in the article which is about features of the OS that don't work on macOS but on Linux. "Linux can't ran Adobe Creative Cloud Apps natively which a lot of designers use" would also not fit this kind of list.

Why not? Its a perfectly valid criticism of linux and a good reason to choose OSX if you need adobe.

As a developer who needs docker, OSX is not the best choice. If I was a designer, OSX is a better choice.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#335
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use osxfuse to mount ssh filesystems on Mac.

> or require adding unsupported 3rd party software Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?

No, heck, there are apps like Mountain Duck that do it fine. I should know, that's how we did share drives for offsite staff during Covid. There are plenty of free apps, I just went with a non-free option.

Comparing a stock Mac OS to a Linux distribution with packages installed is pretty shady.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#336
post #164

My biggest bug bears with macOS: - No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. All a new workspace achieves is making it difficult for me to switch between this app and my other apps! (individual apps can implement this, and some like VLC do, but most apps don't) - No native support for containerisation. Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally eve…

> Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally everything else is super speedy, they're really slow. Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd inotify or you end up running intel images on aarch64, which uses non-virtualizing qemu to emulate the foreign CPU (see github.com/tonistigii/binfmt)…

I'm using Docker for Mac on an M1 Pro and it's stupidly fast, to the point that my dev environment runs faster than the Intel production servers on some things.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#337
To each to their own. It's quite evident that the author simply dislikes MacOS. Many of these problems if these can be labelled as such, aren't really serious issues for the majority of users. And in some cases it seems that the author is used to other operating systems and hasn't spent enough time on MacOS or isn't inclined to learn the differences.

> I know you're going to be tempted to reply with "you're using it wrong" - but I'm not. This is how I like to use my computer.

This part of the closing statement simply baffles me. I use both Linux and a Mac and I like both. In fact MacOS has spoilt me in many ways and I get frustrated when things don't work as nicely on Linux. But I still like both.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#338

> Read MTP devices > Mount an SSH or NFS drive I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer. As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design…

> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering

I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.

On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#339

My biggest bug bears with macOS: - No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. All a new workspace achieves is making it difficult for me to switch between this app and my other apps! (individual apps can implement this, and some like VLC do, but most apps don't) - No native support for containerisation. Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally eve…

> No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. One of the reasons why I almost never use the full screen feature. You can click on the full screen button on the too left-hand corner of each window whilst holding Option, I think that’s the closest you can do out-of-the box. You can assign a keyboard shortcut for this very easily (seriously, the way we can define keyboard shortcuts for alm…

What keyboard shortcuts are you missing in Linux? At least with KDE, I can go the entire day without touching the rodent. And on the rare occasions that I do use the mouse, I'm mostly touching it only for webpages that don't work with Tridactyl, or for highlight-middle-click copy-paste.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#340

> Read MTP devices > Mount an SSH or NFS drive I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer. As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design…

NFS mounts are supported in macOS natively SSH mounts are done with osxfuse MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.

OSXFuse is now replaced with sshfs, but it’s now a PITA to install it via Homebrew because macFUSE, a dep for sshfs has turned closed-source and Homebrew would refuse to install sshfs for that reason.

You’d have to install macFUSE binary from their official site first, and load their kernel extension via the GUI, before running the Homebrew command to solve it.

Which begs the question: if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?

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