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

shkspr.mobi

431–440 of 740 posts

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

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I'll add some to the list: - Control external monitor sound volume. There are buggy paid and open source solutions, but they all trigger all kind of bugs with sound and macOS itself. - Capture game audio with OBS together with microphone input. - Being able to wait for files to copy and work Finder at the same time. Yeah I could find replacement for Finder, but why the hell? - Use Valve Proton. Yeah, Linux is great t…

You can use macOS’s Audio MIDI Setup app to control the volume of each sound channel separately. Not easy to find, but it is built in.

Awesome! Now I can listen to music using headphones while being able to play it through the MacBook speakears at the same time. That'll provide a better social experience of listening to music.

I'm sure there are more uses to be found but that was the most immediate I found.

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

#432

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…

I am currently using M1 at work and it sucks Ass. The two main painpoints are the unpredicble window manager and the keyboard layout. WM: 1. There is no deterministict layouts available 2. You can not tab between windows of the same application, (problematic if you use multiple chrome profiles) 3. Switching to a window USUALLY opens the wrong one. In my case, I somehow always endup in VS Code when tabbing to Teams 4.…

Point 2 is handled with cmd` (backtick). The fn keys thing is a setting

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

#433
post #429
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. Good experience essentially means good defaults, stuff work reliably as expected and when things break you fix them easily. That usually require good edge case handling and justified restrictions. Notice how OP complains about not being able to change the default font and text size? Well, he is technically right but the thing is that Apple has already addressed the reason behind changing fonts by design…

Yes, some of these make sense. I agree with you on fonts. On the other hand what makes the windows snapping behavior/lack of thereof without fiddling a good default?

Yep, I also think that macOS can use some improvements on the window management department but there are very good tools to fix that.

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

#434
The thing that astonished me when I moved to MacOS was how many odd choices they made in Finder. For example:

* Not being able to easily rename a series of files (i.e. with `tab`).

* How it defaults to searching the entire computer rather than the current folder.

* The unintuitive way that moving files works (i.e. you can't just cmd-x, cmd-v, like everywhere else, you have to copy it, then opt-cmd-v).

I recognize that posting this invites someone to tell me I'm doin' it wrong, and there's actually a better way to do these things. I welcome that!

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

#435

As a new mac user (~4 weeks with new employer) my biggest N are: 1) inability to ask the window manager "which workspace/desktop am I on" - it also seems like this ability has been progressively removed with newer versions (judging from stackoverflow/askdifferent questions) - after some hacking I've found a workaround for this 2) clicking on a browser notification just brings me to _any_ window of the browser, not th…

Am I the only one who actually finds more desktop a drawback then a benefit? I clearly haven't mastered multiple desktops -- do you split between projects and just leave it there always? I haven't figured out how to best optimize that which I feel I am leaving real value on the table.

I use i3 (tiling window manager) basically as a maximize-by-default: I have everything either maximized or split vertically once. When I use more windows than that, I typically spread them between workspaces.

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

#436

> 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/macfuse requires a kernel extension which is a _lot_ of troubles on newer macOS and apple is likely to forbid completely any day.

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

#437

> 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.

> NFS mounts are supported in macOS natively

..and MacOS lets you mount an nfs share ootb as a user. On linux you need an fstab entry for that though that is really not an issue at all.

How you ask? You do this with the mac specific command: mount_nfs Here is how I use it to mount shares from my NAS. $ mount_nfs -o nolocks,nfsvers=3 /home/nas/myshares/nfs /Users/bob/nas/nfs

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

osxfuse is not a reasonable answer. The author says “without unsupported 3rd party tools”. I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.

How many of the functionalities the author misses and doesn't want to install "unsupported 3rd party tools" are NOT 3rd party tools in ubuntu? Ubuntu linux is a distribution, and only a very very small set of tools and functionalities is "Ubuntu", all the others are simply packaged up 3rd party tools

Mac OSX is also a distribution, containing (formerly mostly GNU and now mostly BSD) third-party utilities. However, the surface area that Mac OSX tries to cover in terms of real UNIX utilities is getting smaller and smaller.

It's almost ;) as if Apple doesn't care if real UNIX people prefer their laptops anymore.

Apple has moved on, to a bigger and far less demanding market: "real" people who have never heard of the artist formerly known as UNIX.

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

#439

Valid points in the article. Slightly related: I feel it's worth spreading the word about yabai [1], a tiling window manager for MacOs. I've been using it for >1 year, to get an i3 like experience, and find that it makes using MacOs very pleasant. Issues in the article are somewhat addressed: > Focus Follow Mouse Can do this with yabai > Always on top windows Can do this with yabai > Window snapping Can do this with…

I'd like to try it but seems like it doesn't do much without disabling SIP, which I'm reluctant to do on my work laptop.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It’s easy to say so now that I’ve gotten it to work, but the whole process isn’t documented at all on any website. I daily drive macOS, Debian, and Windows (for personal & work purposes) - the same can be said for Linux (auto mounting a WebDAV share on boot), but at least: - Linux’s documentation is much more comprehensive than Apple - whatever you do on Linux some guy from 2003 would have already done so, whereas go…

>whatever you do on Linux some guy from 2003 would have already done so

Ah, sure, but that was pre-systemd. Or maybe the solution was for XFree86 and now I'm on Wayland... Or an interesting incantation of ifconfig, which might not even be installed by default?

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