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

shkspr.mobi

571–580 of 740 posts

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

#571
post #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"…

You can install sshfs via brew, but it works a lot better if you just download the package manually.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend using sshfs on Mac. I used it for about a year, and about 90% of the time it worked great. The rest of the time it would hang, just not sync, not let me write files, etc. and every couple of weeks it would break so badly that a restart was the only fix, usually at the most inopportune times.

I ended up just grabbing an old external hard drive and installing syncthing. The remote server still has all the RAID and backups and whatnot, but now I basically have a local cache on the old hard drive, so it works consistently and is fast. If it breaks, oh well, I'll get another one and sync it again.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro oh... oh you poor soul :P I used to use Arch on a high end gaming laptop when I was younger and had time to waste on things like dotfiles and perfecting my vim config and jumping through hoops like Bonus level Sonic. Now I opt for lovely simple boring functional Dell laptops from my employer and install Fedora on everything. Out of Windows OSX and Ubuntu/Arch/Fedo…

Don’t want to jinx it but the process has been painless. Technically I’m using EndeavourOS. Had to install with a USB wireless adapter but after the driver, it’s great. Everything “just works” including suspend/wake with lid, keyboard backlighting, brightness/volume fn keys etc.

Printing on HP deskjet? What about scanning? Can you share your files on a local network with samba? (painlessly I mean)

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Way back in the late '90s and early '00s, lots of PC games with mouse look simply drew a window behind the game and placed the mouse cursor in the center. Every frame it would measure the distance the cursor traveled from center and reset it to poll for mouse movement. This meant that your OS mouse acceleration settings directly impacted how your mouse felt in game. If you've ever had a game glitch out and show a mouse cursor stuck in the middle of the screen, this is why.

Some of us who grew up playing these games got used to using Windows with no mouse acceleration. This is because it is easier to build muscle memory without it, since a certain distance traveled with the mouse will always produce the same camera movement in game regardless of how fast the mouse was moved.

How we deal with it? I think there are three factors, at least in my case;

1: Mouse sensitivity. I run my mouse at 1600 DPI, which is 2-4x higher than your typical typical cheap office mouse. I can zip across a large display pretty quick.

2: Fine motor skills. Years of Quake and other fast paced shooters have elevated my mouse accuracy above that of your typical computer user, allowing me to function on the desktop at a high mouse sensitivity.

3: On-the-fly DPI adjustments. My mouse has buttons for cycling through a number of sensitivity presets. I set mine to have 400, 800, and 1600 DPI. When something requires high mouse precision (such as photo editing) I turn the sensitivity down.

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

#574
post #543

I switched from Linux to MacOS around 14 years ago. With Linux it's not only that I could change everything (system font, acceleration of the mouse pointer etc), but I literally HAD to do it. First days after buying new laptop and installing Linux I had to spend of configuring everything – from mouse pointers to Google calendar integration, often with obscure command line or config setups. That was fun. Until I bough…

The last 14 years have seen a lot of changes to linux desktops and window managers. There are several high quality options that require very little to no configuration to have a pleasant experience.

Hardware wise, things are a bit mixed. I'm writing this from an LG gram that runs perfectly out of the box- screen, wifi, sleep, everything Just Works. The battery life is fantastic.

The only real configuration that I've done is the same configuration I would do on a mac anyway via karabiner / hammerspoon.

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

#575
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it sort of reminds me of an interview someone did w/ a farmer's market vendor of gourmet jams/jellies....when they had a spread of 29-30 jams, no one bought any because it was too intimidating/confusion/bred indecision or whatever They changed their lineup to 6 jams and sales went thru the roofff

Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults. When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen. But the scroll settings is much more annoying than that. Apple provides two completely independent settings for "Mouse" and "Trackpad". Under each, there is a toggle for scroll direction.…

Maybe they should present it as one setting. But linking it makes sense for the vast majority of users. Because if it wasn’t you would see a flood of people asking why their mouse or trackpad is scrolling in the wring direction.

I‘m more and more convinced that the Apple way is the right way for the vast majority of users and deeper customization should only be available through the CLI or extensions.

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

#576
One thing I cannot live without is the ease at which you can setup network interfaces on Linux. For example, with docker compose I can add this snippet:

  networks:
    vpcbr:
      driver: bridge
      ipam:
       config:
         - subnet: 10.20.0.0/16
           gateway: 10.20.0.1
And, then each service can use something like this:

      networks:
        vpcbr:
          ipv4_address: 10.20.0.6
docker-compose up creates the network, and I can seamlessly access my services by a private IP address VPC. It's so powerful for testing real-world services where you need to have cookies created on the right IP address that is a different one from the auth server, etc.

With OSX I have to use things like 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.2, but my docker compose file isn't aware of it, and it is very hacky.

Linux networking supporting is phenomenal and so flexible.

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

#577

I had to use a Mac at work some time ago. Here's my list: * Cannot drag to copy, middle-click to paste. * No way to disable sticky keys lock. * No way to set ESC as Caps Lock. * No way to set a keyboard shortcut for each specific language. (I use five) * Alt-tab to an _Application_, not a _Window_. How many times will I Alt-Tab to.... nothing! * Return from sleep will rearrange the order of the connected monitors, ev…

You can use this app to get the alt-tab behavior from Windows on macOS if you want: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

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

#578
post #472
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…

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1 Works on my M1 Max well enough to be satisfied with my mouse in SC2.

In the before-times, in the long-long-ago, we could modify basic system settings from a nice discoverable GUI control panel. Why is the future year of 2022, no doubt filled with flying cars and personal jetpacks, continually found to be unable to deliver features we took for granted in 1995?

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

#579
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it sort of reminds me of an interview someone did w/ a farmer's market vendor of gourmet jams/jellies....when they had a spread of 29-30 jams, no one bought any because it was too intimidating/confusion/bred indecision or whatever They changed their lineup to 6 jams and sales went thru the roofff

Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults. When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen. But the scroll settings is much more annoying than that. Apple provides two completely independent settings for "Mouse" and "Trackpad". Under each, there is a toggle for scroll direction.…

> Okay, except this is nothing like that.

And yet… desktop Linux isn’t widely popular.

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

#580
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it sort of reminds me of an interview someone did w/ a farmer's market vendor of gourmet jams/jellies....when they had a spread of 29-30 jams, no one bought any because it was too intimidating/confusion/bred indecision or whatever They changed their lineup to 6 jams and sales went thru the roofff

Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults. When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen. But the scroll settings is much more annoying than that. Apple provides two completely independent settings for "Mouse" and "Trackpad". Under each, there is a toggle for scroll direction.…

> Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults. When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen.

This is possible, but never as easy as it sounds when written down like that. Even when advanced settings are tucked away out of sight from regular users, at the kind of scale OS X or iOS operates in (or Linux, for that matter), there will be a non-negligible number of people who by accident or intent fool around with the advanced settings and get themselves into a state from which they lack the expertise to extricate themselves.

This is why Apple layer their own UX on top of Bluetooth, for example. And why many settings have no UX, you have to know the magic incantation to use in Terminal.

Again, I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that "Making a boat for passengers AND for sailors" is a hard problem.

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