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

The erosion of the Mac experience

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 490 posts

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#311

Post by Tao3300 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #296
throwaway675309 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And windows file explorer copying was inconsistent and buggy as hell from nearly a decade, but installing teracopy fixed that issue. As long as an OS is plug-in friendly, stock issues that can be easily remedied don't bother me. If you're using multiple monitors and you're not using the rectangle app... that's kinda on you. I switched to Mac after using windows for decades and in less than a week I solved my windows…

> If you're using multiple monitors and you're not using the rectangle app... that's kinda on you. This attitude strikes me as snobbery. People aren't born knowing the best 3rd party alternative to their OS's shortcomings, and some have no control over what apps they can run. Windows 10 has pretty good built in window management. IMO better than MacOS. I say this as a Mac and Rectangle user. (Though only Mac because…

It's also the attitude that's endemic in a lot of Mac forums, so good luck finding out answers when everyone rolls their eyes because you should already know.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#312

Post by KerrAvon »

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…

Your assertion about “The Mac Way” is simply false. The VP in charge of macOS is an ex-NeXT person; a lot of ex-NeXT and Apple people still work on it.

macOS user experience continues to be driven from the UI design group and executives, as it always has been.

Feel free to criticize the design direction, but understand that it’s fully top-down intentional, not something that just happens because individual software engineering positions are suddenly filled with non-Mac people. That’s not how it works.

macOS is designed by UI designers.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#313

Post by Tao3300 »

white_dragon88 wrote: post #215
ricardobayes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the hate MS gets, windows 11 is pretty much perfect. Never had any issues with it whatsoever. Even teams runs well on it, not so much on Mac from what I hear. "I can't share my screen" "Teams has crashed" I would be furious if my 2k EUR Mac couldn't run a chat app.

Yeah… you lost all credibility when bringing up teams as a benchmark. It’s a piece of utter steaming junk that I would barely call software. Zoom and slack work just fine because they weren’t built by imbeciles.

Zoom and Slack do not work fine.

Zoom just sits around devouring CPU while it's not even on a call.

If I ever walk in and my MacBook sounds like a jet trying to take off and is hot enough to cook dinner on, I know it's because Slack wants to update. I have no idea what it's doing to show me that "needs to install a helper" dialog.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#314

Post by ssivark »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #113
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.

I am the "analysis software coordinator" for a nuclear physics experiment (MUSE). The software framework we use was originally developed by me, on a macbook pro, mainly, targeting both MacOS and Linux. We have to onboard new students regularly, and it's quite a software stack to compile (Geant4, root, helper libs, our framework). 5-10 years ago, I was happy if a new student was on Mac. Slap homebrew on it, install th…

On a tangent -- You might want to look into Guix (at least just the package manager, if not the whole system/distribution); it seems quite popular for similar use cases. See, eg: https://hpc.guix.info/about/

Also, with regards to linux, what stops you from making that the default that students onboard to? I would imagine that something like this becomes quite easy if you have a culture where group members help onboard the new ones into the ways of doing things.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#315

Post by nazgulsenpai »

derefr wrote: post #265
kyriakos wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that mean windows is superior in handling those monitors by applying the solution so the user won't need to go looking? I understand the monitor manufacturers are at fault but the OS tries to be as compatible as possible and handles the hardware.

No—Windows takes a strictly worse approach. macOS [and Linux] give you “some [not to spec] monitors have very slightly blurry text”; but Windows gives you “some TVs just plain don’t work at all.” Note how I didn’t say that the TVs are not-to-spec; that’s because the EDID spec allows TVs to just not report an EDID (TVs are low-margin, and that’s one fewer chip on the signal path), where the video source then must assu…

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Learned something new.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#316

Post by nordsieck »

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…

> 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 that their behavior works even worse. So maybe that’s a “don’t ever try to learn another alt-tab behavior than what you already do now”

I think the one big benefit I notice of OSX style program management vs Windows style is: with OSX, you have have a program open, but without any windows. Whereas with Windows, if you close all of a program's windows, that typically kills the program.

Really, this mostly shows up when I want to create a new incognito browser window when I don't have any browser windows currently open. On OSX, I just tab to the browser and open up a new window. On Windows, I have to start a new regular window and then open a new incognito windows. It's pretty annoying.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#317

Post by _chu1 »

derefr wrote: post #156
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 attach a non Mac external monitor to a new MacBook Pro from work and the text is super blurry. Much googling later and I need to use something called Better Display to create a virtual display, and project that to my monitor That’s not the correct solution. The correct solution is for the monitor manufacturer to stop reporting an EDID that identifies their monitor as a TV (and thereby forces the OS to default to…

[flagged]

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#318

Post by egypturnash »

There is really no reason to keep on adding stuff to OSX/MacOS. It's done. It does everything it needs to do. It has been done for something like a decade. It should be in maintenance mode, with bugs being fixed as they show up and nothing really changing.

And yet every year there's a new version. Mostly it's a bunch of new features on the bundled programs that I don't ever touch. And a new skin on the GUI. Sometimes it breaks something that was working just fine; I personally quit staying up to date when I balked at a new OS whose main feature was "broke all 32-bit apps forever". I finally upgraded to the latest version in the past few months so I can deal with getting stuff working on the M2 Air I'll be getting soon. Preparing for that has made me replace two perfectly-functional drawing tablets because Wacom's newest drivers won't support them and the ones that do predate the M1.

Honestly I doubt I'm gonna be upgrading that M1 from whatever OS it comes with until the latest version of Illustrator stops working on it, or Apple stops doing bugfix releases. Or if I have to replace it because it gets broken. I just do not need this endless cycle of change for its own sake, done by people whose idea of what a computer "should" be is increasingly shaped by growing up with an iPhone in their hand instead of an 8-bit computer on their desk.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#319

Post by nordsieck »

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…

> Why are 3rd party applications distributed as Disk Images? Then some as package installers? It's weird and nonsensical.

Maybe you use a lot of paid software?

I just use homebrew for everything, and it just works(tm) 98% of the time. Which is way better than my experience with Windows. I tried using a variety of Nanite, Chocolatey, etc. And none of it seems particularly mature.

> Mac hardware feels great, but I just cannot understand why it's the preferred developer platform.

In my experience, Windows is developer hostile if you aren't using Visual Studio. Almost everything is deployed to Linux, and OS X is close enough that most stuff just works, but the drivers and UI are also completely dependable.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#320

Post by filchermcurr »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #223
white_dragon88 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like if you discount third-party applications, you should also discount the addition of peripherals like additional monitors, as they're not the stock experience either.

This seems to come up with every argument about operating systems. People say it sucks if you have to use third-party applications, but I vehemently disagree. The fact that you CAN use third-party applications, the fact that they have sufficient access to make the experience better, the fact that the community exists to make them... I think that's a major pro in favor of an OS.

Post reply on HN