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

shkspr.mobi

521–530 of 740 posts

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

#521
post #467

I switched from Linux Mint desktop to an M1 Air last year. Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about). I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of tro…

The mouse acceleration curve on Mac drives me insane. There is a way to set it to "0" with some command line incantation, but it still does not set it to 0. Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.

How do you "zero mouse acceleration" people survive? I have three monitors side by side. If I went with zero mouse acceleration, I'd need a 3 meter wide mouse pad in order to be able to move the mouse cursor edge to edge! Or do you do that mouse bicycle move where you constantly pick the mouse up, bring it back to its original position, move it some more, pick it back up, and so on? Such a weird subculture :)

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

#522
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app? I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers! Yes I have noticed this too! I love my MacBook, but the idea that I would pay what, $20, for the top tier window snapping app is completely ridiculous. That’s something that should be built in to the shell!

> Window Snapping Use https://www.spectacleapp.com/ - it's free. It's not exactly the same, but better in many ways - excepting the auto-drag snapping. Snapping is via key combination instead.

IIRC Spectacle is no longer maintained and is spiritually succeeded by https://rectangleapp.com

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

#523
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrt audio: What any pulseaudio or pipewire-based desktop can do, is to route streams from separate applications to separate devices. You can have one application playing into your headphones, second into your speakers and third streaming over bluetooth to your soundbar. Never managed to do anything similar with Mac (also I never explored any 3rd-party apps to do it, they might exist, but with PA/Pipewire, it is built…

I personally used advanced PulseAudio features all the time by playing different audio in headphones and speakers, but it's still rarely used feature compared to audio volume control. One of neatest things I did on Linux is playback of multiple audio streams while watching series when using VLC. It's very cool when you have some international group of friends together and e.g someone prefer to watch in German, someon…

How do you rig all that stuff up? Commandline or is there a pretty gui for doing it?

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

#524
post #467

I switched from Linux Mint desktop to an M1 Air last year. Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about). I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of tro…

The mouse acceleration curve on Mac drives me insane. There is a way to set it to "0" with some command line incantation, but it still does not set it to 0. Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.

> The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works"

It does (generally) just work! However, it works they way they want you to use it.

That's fine for me and I usually am happy to adapt. It doesn't mean infinitely configurable.

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re kidding right? Linux as a desktop OS is a dumpster fire in my experience. Many times I’ve had a system working for a couple of months, only to be laid low mysteriously by an update. This happened on everything from Ubuntu to Mint to Arch. The last straw for me (not stability related) was when I needed to scan something. Cue hours spent in the terminal… still no scanning. MacOS will keep working for years for m…

So what sounds more plausible: - Lots of people happily use "a dumpster fire" where you have "hours spent in the terminal… still no scanning" and are completely unbothered by serious issues you are describing. - Your exaggeration is absolutely ridiculous. Criticism is fine, but at least make it sound vaguely plausible.

You are the one exaggerating by saying "lots of people" and "completely unbothered". Linux on the desktop is famous for being neither popular nor easy, surely this isn't new information for you.

If you like it, knock yourself out. I'll stick to OS's that employ product managers for my daily drivers.

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

#526

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…

> 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.

This does seem to be the basic philosophy Apple has adopted for its devices. Which is why I don't use them. I don't like their defaults (which means the whole concept of "sensible defaults" doesn't really make sense except in reference to some particular set of users, and there are many such sets with different preferences), I like being able to customize things (because my idea of how I want to work is never the same as some designer's idea), and I'm going to be doing things that the OS designer didn't think of (particularly since I'm a developer). In short, my experience with Apple devices is that they don't let me work the way I want to work. So I don't work with them.

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

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stability ???? Ubuntu is far more stable. Have never had issues wrt stability. I have had issues with support as in some software do not work on linux (Turbo Tax , Games etc) but never in stability. Have been using linux desktops since 2010

You’re kidding right? Linux as a desktop OS is a dumpster fire in my experience. Many times I’ve had a system working for a couple of months, only to be laid low mysteriously by an update. This happened on everything from Ubuntu to Mint to Arch. The last straw for me (not stability related) was when I needed to scan something. Cue hours spent in the terminal… still no scanning. MacOS will keep working for years for m…

> MacOS will keep working for years for most everyone

My working mac hangs about 1 time in 3 days. With completely un-addressable memory leak and lag. And close everything don't help either. The only way I found to solve it reliably is a reboot. While my linux vm and main windows system lives like forever (heck, I don't even bother to reboot them if not a update, because why?).

From my perspective, I though you are just kidding. I don't even see it runs perfectly more than one week.

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

#528

2 of these 3 things, I have done multiple times on a Mac. Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS and has been for nearly a decade. Mounting SSH is supported by 3rd-party tools, yes, but they're the same cross-platform 3rd-party tool you'd use in Linux... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac and is not installed by default in most Linux distributions (although fair eno…

[deleted]

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

#529

> 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.

macos also natively supports mounting sftp through Finder as long as password auth is available

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

#530

2 of these 3 things, I have done multiple times on a Mac. Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS and has been for nearly a decade. Mounting SSH is supported by 3rd-party tools, yes, but they're the same cross-platform 3rd-party tool you'd use in Linux... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac and is not installed by default in most Linux distributions (although fair eno…

" ... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac ..."

I've given a lot of thought to ssh/sftp mount points (for obvious reasons) and the standard recipe (and support answer) at rsync.net has been FUSE/sshfs.

I've even written a handful of scripts and one-liners to support my personal use of sshfs on my own machines, etc.

But lately ... I've just switched to using "Mountain Duck" which does everything I want and is quick and easy and slick and professional.

I forget what the license cost is, but it's worth it. The "official" FUSE for OSX and sshfs packages were getting old and came from odd sources (sshfs for mac is from 2014) and I don't think you can 'brew install' them, etc.

Mountain Duck.

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