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The erosion of the Mac experience

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Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#221

Post by GordonS »

white_dragon88 wrote: post #214
GordonS wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you. I regularly use both Windows and MacOS, though I started with Windows king before MacOS... and I just fine MacOS so unintuitive, ugly and clunky! Also, it regularly crashes when plugging/unplugging an external monitor. Actually, it crashes every now and then for no discernable reason too - feels like Windows back in the day when BSOD was common! And not MacOS' fault, but I absolutely loathe my MBP'…

If it’s randomly crashing that could be a hardware issue. I’ve owned numerous MacBooks and Mac minis over the years, nothing should ever be crashing randomly, especially not macOS.

It does it even when nothing else is plugged in, and I've had occasional crashes since I got it 5+ years ago (so, across multiple MacOS versions).

TBH, the crashing when plugging/unplugging, HiDPI issues and general ugliness and clunkyness are far more annoying tho!

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#222

Post by srvmshr »

> Fresh new hires, who’ve never known a reason to care about the Mac, trying to rewrite key portions of the OS

Apple Support engineers do not understand the basics sometimes. I noticed my 15" 2880x1800 screen showed a resolution of 1440x900 after 12.5 upgrade. I raised a ticket and my request was patched to Apple US who ran a bunch of tests remotely & were confused what & why. I never bothered looking at resolution before, so this half resolution thing bothered me.

I dug out an exact replica config from office running 12.0.1 & voila it was running 1440x900 too. Then it dawned on me: The retina screen allocates 4 hardware pixels for each 'screen' pixel - so effectively canvas size was 1440x900 although screen resolution remains 2880x1800 at 220ppi

Apple engineer in the bug report still struggling to understand this. I have no words except teling him this is a feature not a bug. I genuinely think the software devs are very fragmented within Apple & they don't really understand the customer facing issues entirely.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#223

Post by bsagdiyev »

white_dragon88 wrote: post #212
jesseryoung wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, I'm a dev who prefers Windows over Mac. I'm convinced that most Mac users don't use multiple monitors and they're completely fine with the really poor window management. It boggles my mind; I am objectively less productive with a single monitor than I am with multiple.

I’m a Mac user and have 4 monitors plus my laptop’s screen. I use this https://rectangleapp.com/ to add snappiness to my windows. And it kicks ass

Which is not a stock macOS app. Which is what the point was. Stock macOS sucks with window and monitor management. I run three screens and it's aggravating sometimes.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#224

Post by pjmlp »

bodhiandphysics wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT professionals were using Mac before that, or do you think DTP, 2D, Excel, Illustration,... sprungs out of thin air?

Unix you layer a major role in the success of the Mac in two key markets. First max was the cool box for young developers, since it provided a Unix dev environment and this such nice things as Python, ruby, reasonable c++, git, etc. when these often worked poorly on windows. 2) while emgineering software moved from Unix to windows in the early 2000s, scientific software often did not. It was however available on macs…

Only when one equates "developers === UNIX", which is why so many still don't get Apple developer's culture, even with two decades of OS X.

C++ on the Mac was already a great development experience with Toolbox and Metrowerks PowerPlant.

Copland was going to be fully based on C++.

If you look close enough to NeXT's history and how Steve Jobs thought about UNIX beards, NeXT only supported UNIX as means to compete against Sun on the workstation market.

His reluctant appearance at USENIX is well documented.

Everything was supposed to be coded with Objective-C frameworks, down to the device drivers.

If anything those "developers" are now finding out that they should have been giving money to Linux OEMs instead.

While Microsoft discovered that that group doesn't really care about Linux per se, only having POSIX toys around, and given that Linux compatibility nowadays matters more than POSIX (even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers), they decided to reboot SUA with WSL.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#225

Post by comfypotato »

wodenokoto wrote: post #194
lastangryman wrote: post #133

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

I’m using a windows machine for work and I hate it. Explorer and outlook change application icon depending on what you are doing. I can never find them when I alt-tab. I can never find anything in word or excel or any other application that use windows style menus. On Mac you at least get a real menu. I never got used to macOS’ alt-tab when I switched more than a decade ago, but now that I’m back on windows I find th…

> Isn’t that because it comes with a Unix shell? I’m using wsl and only like 1 or 2 gui programs can talk with my Linux files in a reasonable fashion.

Can you elaborate? I've been using WSL1 as a tool to operate on files on my Windows file system and haven't had any issues. (As an aside, I'm actually very pleased with this approach.) Are your issues specifically with GUI programs running through WSL? I'm just checking to make sure I don't get locked into a workflow that causes me problems down the road.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#226

Post by comfypotato »

jesseryoung wrote: post #177
lastangryman wrote: post #133

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

I'm with you, I'm a dev who prefers Windows over Mac. I'm convinced that most Mac users don't use multiple monitors and they're completely fine with the really poor window management. It boggles my mind; I am objectively less productive with a single monitor than I am with multiple.

Windows window management doesn't really scale well beyond 3 monitors either. I use AHK with great results, and I imagine Mac has a similar non-native program. That being said, I've never even tried to migrate to Mac or Linux because I'm most productive with 8 monitors and the support for that number sounds abysmal on anything but Windows.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#227

Post by pjmlp »

wizofaus wrote: post #151
pjmlp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be the only way to do UNIX development, many moons ago, via thin terminals.

And you'd voluntarily go back to that?

Yes, that is what cloud computing is all about, with the added benefit making UNIX irrelevant.

Now it is all managed runtimes, on top of type 1 hypervisors, and containers, with browser based shells and IDEs.

Unikernels have won even if it doesn't look like it from the surface.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#228

Post by LinearEntropy »

lbwtaylor wrote: post #96
drawingthesun wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moved on to where? Windows has adverts in the start menu! Desktop Linux GUI is still painful and really only suitable for those who love to tinker. Since I moved to Mac from Windows I’m thankful for macOS even if it could be better, it’s still much more usable than the alternatives. I find myself spending more time on my professional work and less time fixing driver issues or fighting annoying in OS ads.

Apple constantly spams you with popup ads for their cloud services, far worse IMHO than any start menu nonsense. To each their own.

Which popups are these? The only one I ever received was when I hit the limit on my iCloud account. Certainly not anywhere as bad as all the adverts in teh start menu on my Windows work machine.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#229

Post by trenchgun »

drawingthesun wrote: post #91
runjake wrote: post #43

The key point in this Twitter rant is that the SWEs who understood the Mac (and NEXTSTEP, for that matter) have aged out. Most everyone has retired or moved onto other opportunities. There's very few of them left at Apple. And they're often overruled by younger managers. Apple is hiring tons of fresh new SWEs who have no understanding, nor desire to understand "The Mac Way". I'm not saying this is right or wrong, the…

Moved on to where? Windows has adverts in the start menu! Desktop Linux GUI is still painful and really only suitable for those who love to tinker. Since I moved to Mac from Windows I’m thankful for macOS even if it could be better, it’s still much more usable than the alternatives. I find myself spending more time on my professional work and less time fixing driver issues or fighting annoying in OS ads.

> Desktop Linux GUI is still painful and really only suitable for those who love to tinker.

KDE is pretty nice.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#230

Post by 7speter »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #95
what-imright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs was against dogma. It’s a changing world and the perspective and input of the young is valuable. What exactly are you moving on to? Ubuntu? Windows? Behind macOS is the most valuable company in the world adding fixes, features and security patches. There isn’t any other computing solution today that can deliver what Apple does.

I can't see Linux (or other GNU-desktop-nixlike) becoming a full-time macOS replacement for me because no DE works the way I'd like it to. You've got KDE (Windowslike), GNOME (what if iPadOS were adapted into a desktop OS), XFCE (middle ground between Windows and Classic Mac OS), and Cinnamon (Classic Windowslike), and Pantheon (what if iPadOS looked like Mac OS X Mavericks). None that are an obvious choice for someo…

My concern with a classic macos interface (or even a classic windows interface), is how do newer features get mapped to those sorts of d.e.’s. We’re used to so many features (and little apps like windows snipping tool) and features that we might just normally use a given os’ search bar, (this feature seems to have come from os x and moved elsewhere, I’m even forgetting what apple called it…) would there even be an equivalent to be able to make an equivalent? Maybe I’m showing my age (maybe lack thereof, I only know about the “bicycles of the mind quote” maybe from watching a nightline segment featuring Steve Jobs on youtube, or I saw it somwwhere while reading about him/and or the early pc era)…
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