Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 459 posts

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#61

Post by ConstantineXVI »

vegai wrote: post #49
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your time and stress are not unlimited resources (and therefore not "free"). Being able to buy a Linux system that's guaranteed to work (and continue to) out of the box on certain hardware (or better yet, come pre-installed on that certain hardware) would be worth a fair amount of money to many people.

But... nobody can guarantee that. Have you never used paid software? I mean sure, I can take your money. I can promise you things. So what? And why the hell was I downmodded for asking a legit question? Is this place falling into reddit land?

Yes they can. They can focus on a specific model, even work directly with the OEM (or be the OEM), put a $60 price tag on the box, and have a warranty that says "We guarantee that this Linux distro will work out of the box on model X; we'll keep all the software updated for a year; you can call us if it breaks; and we'll refund you if we can't help." If no one can make that sort of guarantee for money; why should I even bother trying to do it myself?

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#62

Post by artursapek »

andrewpi wrote: post #51
artursapek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait- they removed "Save as"? I am so glad I chose to ignore Lion.

Only in Apple-produced apps like TextEdit. Microsoft Word, etc. still have it.

Oh my god, so it's inconsistent and it's a step in the wrong direction?

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#63

Post by ugh »

megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

OS X obviously isn’t for you.

OS X doesn’t have some features you would like it to have or you need. Looking at the features you are missing it doesn’t seem like they are central for most users. If a feature is not there you simply can’t use the OS. That’s fair enough. It just doesn’t seem like that’s really a problem OS X has.

Especially when you are coming from a different background it also can be hard to understand when an OS is doing something differently. This has nothing to do with it being better or worse, it’s just different.

Alt-Arrows will move you from word to word in Terminal (and also in every other text field), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E will move you to the beginning and end of the line. That second set of shortcuts sucks because it isn’t consistent with the whole rest of the OS where Cmd-Arrows will move you to the beginning and end of lines and texts (depending on the direction of arrow you pick). As I said, those shortcuts work in every text field and you can mix them up with Backspace or Shift to delete or select whole words or lines. Many other vi keybindings work wherever you encounter text in OS X.

Shift-Cmd-G will allow you to type a path in Finder, just like in Terminal Tab autocompletes.

The green zoom button sucks and Apple should remove it. It is not supposed to maximize (so those 99% of all apps were doing it right), it usually tries to remove scrollbars (i.e. it grows or shrinks the window until there is no more space or until there are no more scrollbars). Some apps inconsistently treat it like a maximize button. Lion introduced fullscreen apps and the new fullscreen button should be treated as an equivalent (more or less) to Windows’ maximize button.

Lion allows you to resize windows from all sides.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#64

Post by js2 »

FWIW, if he wants to back up his mail before deleting it, the supported way to do it would be to select the mailbox in Mail.app itself and select Export Mailbox…

By hiding the Library folder, Apple isn't trying to be hostile: most users never need to access anything in this folder. Users who are advanced enough to be grubbing around inside the Library should also be advanced enough to know that you can easily get to it via command-shift-g "~/Library". Obviously it also shows up in the Terminal. Apple's merely hidden it from view inside the Finder.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#65

Post by masklinn »

hackoder wrote: post #19

For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays... Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says: Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating. More user-hostile - If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot a…

> He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong.

Most of it being... not smart?

> Right now, since I've switched to Gmail, I'm trying to back up and remove from my machine years of accumulated mail storage from mail.app. First obstacle: a user's library files are now hidden.

No, the ~/Library folder is now hidden, you can see it via Terminal, by opening the Finder's Go menu with an option-click or browse it because you know the path (cmd-shift-G, for instance). This change is sensible: how often does a user need to go into the Library folder?

> Finally find them (thanks Matt Silver), back up the files to an external disk, and then delete them. But then when I empty the trash, an ungodly number of files--going back years--claim they are "in use" and can't be deleted. So here I am having to click "continue" every few thousand files (if I'm lucky) as I page through more than 400,00 files to be deleted. I know this is actually an old mis-feature - but why the devil wouldn't they give you an "ignore" checkbox or a "delete whatever you can checkbox"? This has been a problem for years, but never fixed, while they add new gloss all the time.

He hates OSX now because of something which has been there forever? Like the trash refusing to delete open files you moved there?

There are issues with OSX and there are debatable changes, but his post is simply nonsense.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#66

Post by ugh »

Tycho wrote: post #60
ugh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?” No, we certainly don’t. I love Mission control and I think it’s an improvement over Exposé. Don’t pretend I’m agreeing with you. For me personally Lion has been a solid improvement. Quite a few things that used to suck about OS X still suck but I have seen nothing but improvements or neutral changes with Lion. (Yeah, I have some minor quibbles, but…

The thing about mission control is that they could easily have left the old expose intact as an optional alternative, but nooooo they had to remove it completely and fuck up thousands of users' workflow habits. I mean you have to admit the way mission control stacks windows on top of each other for each application is pretty ridiculous. Other than that it's fairly useful. But there was no good reason to remove the 'a…

I like the way Mission Control stacks windows. As for leaving unstacked windows in: Yeah, well. That’s not how Apple rolls. Love it or hate it.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#67

Post by berkut »

HSO wrote: post #58
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…

> They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.

You don't have to hold down ALT - you can do it without, holding down ALT increases the window edge hit area to make it easier to resize it.

> There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.

And makes using multiple monitors even more pathetic on OS X by effectively disabling other outputs - on top of the age-old problem of the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor, etc, etc...

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#68

Post by WayneDB »

annon wrote: post #50
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

So you hate learning the "myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac," but are praising the intuitiveness of "hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it?"

Well, there are a couple of subtleties that are being addressed, that maybe need to be said better.

1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn.

When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those characters are not on the keyboard.

When I say they're not as discoverable, I mean this: The menu system in Gnome/KDE/Win underlines the letter of the accelerator key for a menu item. This is the first type of keyboard shortcut and OS X doesn't have this at all. The other type with the key-combos is also less discoverable due to the confusing characters.

When I say it's inconsistent, I mean that a shortcut does not always exist for what you want. In Gnome/KDE/Win I can always rely on the consistency of the Alt + Menu Acclerator keys.

2) The fact that you can "hold Alt and middle click anywhere...." in Linux, I think was a testament to how Apple only offers a limited feature set; not that keyboard shortcuts are bad in general.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#69

Post by jessriedel »

HSO wrote: post #58
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…

>> I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard?

> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE ? > Or just use the terminal ?

You just proved his point.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#70

Post by _delirium »

HSO wrote: post #58
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…

>> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

> Darwin ports? Fink?

I've used both for the past near-decade (fink for 4 years, now macports for the past 3), along with a Debian desktop, and they're much worse imo. They do the job sort of, but it's a mess. Stuff just outright breaks much more often than even in Debian 'unstable'; you'll install a package and it'll fail to compile, fail to link, a script will die, etc. Dependencies are a mess, especially as regards versions of interpreted languages (python/perl/etc.), and anything that interacts with X11 tends to be flaky. And the use of binary packages is still very spotty, so a simple install, if it pulls in big library dependencies, might spawn an hour or two of compilation, rather than a few minutes of installation.

It gets the job done somewhat, but I'm not really happy with the situation overall; for many things I prefer to use a Debian VirtualBox install, despite that also having some awkwardness.

Post reply on HN