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

shkspr.mobi

371–380 of 740 posts

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

#371

> 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…

Why are specific protocol support needed to be a general purpose computer and not a toy/specialized tool?

Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.

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

#372
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are SSH mounts natively supported on Linux ? In my case I use sshfs, which also uses FUSE and is a "3rd party tool". Is that more reasonable than osxfuse? (Honest question, I'm unfamiliar with the latter) edit: sshfs is "unsupported": "However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker)." https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs#development-sta…

gvfs-sftp counts as native to me if you're using a gnome desktop. The author is using a fullfat gnome distro like Ubuntu, so it's probably even preinstalled.

I wasn't familiar with that (I don't use gnome). After a quick lookup, it seems it doesn't even use FUSE - but it does have a "fuse bridge" for interoperability with other apps.

Apparently this supports a bunch of other "virtual filesystems", like Google Drive, as well.

Since it's part of Gnome, I guess it's fair to compare this with MacOS and consider it "woking out of the box".

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

#373

> 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…

This reads like "my use case defines what a computer is," which is absolutely as tiresome an argument as any fanboy debate.

I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.

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

#374

Before using a Mac I was told how glorious it was and a feat of engineering. Reality is that the Mac and associated products are not as perfect as Apple fans make it out to be. The window manager on Mac makes me want to scream. Navigating the file system in Finder is not intuitive and don't get me started on the Magic Mouse and it's charging port...

Some more that I find rather annoying:

- Login screen sometimes has US keyboard layout even when the language selector shows otherwise.

- "Installing apps" where you drag them on the applications folder and you get no progress for that copy operation anywhere.

- Permission changes, for example for camera and microphone access, require application restarts.

- Photos application unable to handle even a small amount of pictures copied from my phone, crashes or freezes your machine.

- Thumbnail size in file selection dialogs and even directly in Finder is completely useless.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oversights like these always make me wonder if the author is cunning and Cunningham's Law is at play. Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?

I wonder how much Cunningham's Law contributes to flakey search results? I can totally see people using it to game places like Stack Overflow which are far too trigger happy about removing duplicates.

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

#377

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…

My personal laptop is a mac os, and agree with some of the criticism. However, stability-wise, it has been rock-solid. I also manage my own Ubuntu desktop for work, and had to reinstall the system 3 times from scratch because it magically stopped working. In the end it turned out to be something with a new kernel, but it took me, dunno, 2 days to debug.

People that don’t know how to use and maintain Linux should not be the metric for Linux stability.

Linux will let you shoot yourself in the foot. That is not a Linux problem, PEBKAC.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people have different needs, expectations, and preferences. It’s part of what makes humans interesting. Computers should be made to serve people, not the other way around.

I don't know - I'm a big fan of sensible defaults, lack of customisation (so lack of entropy) and just getting on and using it as designed, rather than trying to bend it to be something else. I'm not sure there can really be any reasonable requirement to move the clock. I think that's just being fussy. For every wacky feature or option someone wants, that has to be built, maintained, tested. Every boolean option you…

You believe moving the clock is a wacky feature? You can already move the macOS dock, so its not like it’s unheard of in that world.

Sensible defaults are great, but after spending most of your day glued to a screen, you start noticing little improvements to your workflow. e.g. i dont want to turn my head all the way to the right to look at the clock (using external monitors)

Thats not a big change, but I believe the sum of all those little changes add up

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on then, you start

I'll start with things that I'm happy to have in mac that didn't have in Linux :) - Cannot run a bunch of programs that stay on the topbar, like LINE ( https://line.me/en/ ), Kap ( https://getkap.co/ ), etc. I am a fairly heavy user of Kap and I love the interface, so this is probably the biggest differentiator for me. I can use Gimp, Inkscape, etc. on Mac so this is not really reversible. - The visual quality of the…

> Drivers all work very well, it's like they built them on purpose for their hardware (!). No more fighting with pulseaudio.

Pulseaudio is not related to drivers, but since you mentioned it, pipewire replaced pulse recently and it's way better than anything macos provides. You just can't operate on audio channels this way on a Mac.

On the other hand, there's lots of drivers which are missing on a Mac or require obnoxious upstream apps. For example Logitech has a 300MB macos app for configuring my mouse, 200MB app for the camera, and printer/scanner comes with ads. They work... sind of. Same settings/devices are exposed in Linux by default, without extra work.

> Upgrading the OS to a major version without worrying if I'll be able to boot next time.

You've been lucky. I've lost the system twice due to updates.

LINE works through Wine, if you ever need it on Linux. https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?

Jumping through hoops? It's installing a pkg file, takes about a minute and it is a one time operation you will never really need to do again.

Have you ever daily driven a linux box? Times have changed but you will jump through hoops far more often than on macOS.

- written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro

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