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The erosion of the Mac experience

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Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#441

Post by kastagg »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #44
rc_kas wrote: post #14

Windows sucks MacOS is headed towards suck If you want a glimpse of the future of desktops : r/unixporn

r/unixporn is full of horribly impractical and poor UX made by bored people who don't really use their computer for serious work. Just tinkerers. Same crowd who post elaborate and artistic BuJo stuff up with to-do entries of "Post up new photos of BuJo to Reddit" and "Get some new pens for BuJo" as tasks. Meta crap.

People customizing their own machines to suit their needs is in fact a good UX as long as they enjoy it

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#442

Post by bsder »

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.

I finally dumped Mac completely for Ubuntu LTS on a Lenovo X1 Carbon about 12 months ago. My experience is that I'm now tinkering with things less on Linux than I used to on macOS/OS X.

I have an external Thundebolt dock that actually works. I'm not on the Xcode treadmill forcing me to update an OS because Apple dropped support. Updates are on my schedule instead of Apple's. I can use an actual standard 3D API (Vulkan) rather than the undocumented pile of crap that is Metal. My Bluetooth speakers are more reliable than they were on macOS. I can set my monitor resolutions without buying a dumbass Mac App. My printing system never gets confused forcing me to reinstall all my printers. I can go on and on.

Is it flawless? No. About once a week, my cursor response goes to absolute shit for about 90 seconds for no obvious reason. Occasionally, I hit one of the Wayland corner cases. Lots of software still doesn't run on Linux--so I have to keep a Windows box floating around, but I had to do that even with macOS. I've had 2 hangs over the last 12 months.

But, overall, while I can list grievances about my Macs endlessly, I have to actually think hard about what has genuinely pissed me off about Ubuntu.

I'm not going to deny anyone's experiences because when that's done to me I just get pissed off. In addition, I made a point to buy somewhat more expensive hardware that was a decent match to Ubuntu (better quality laptop, i5 for better thermal performance, max RAM and SSD). I'm just providing a counterpoint that for some of us Linux is a better environment than Windows or macOS.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#443

Post by jeltz »

kramerger wrote: post #279
piva00 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large-ish tech companies in Sweden.

Absolutely not my experience from Scandinavian companies (Volvo, Ericsson, Saab, ABB,...)

Sure, the old giants use Windows (and some Linux) but those are exceptions. There are plenty of Mac and Linux use in younger tech companies here.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#444

Post by [deleted] »

awinder wrote: post #343
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.” How many different bespoke ways of installing windows applications are there again? Is it even countable? Is installshield beloved by anyone untainted by just dealing with it for decades?

[deleted]

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#445

Post by hammyhavoc »

kastagg wrote: post #441
hammyhavoc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/unixporn is full of horribly impractical and poor UX made by bored people who don't really use their computer for serious work. Just tinkerers. Same crowd who post elaborate and artistic BuJo stuff up with to-do entries of "Post up new photos of BuJo to Reddit" and "Get some new pens for BuJo" as tasks. Meta crap.

People customizing their own machines to suit their needs is in fact a good UX as long as they enjoy it

If you take the doors off of a small city car to make it quicker to get in and out of at the expense of keeping thieves and the weather out, is that good UX?

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#446

Post by nl »

account-5 wrote: post #167
derefr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The OPs solution is the only valid solution they have open to them though.

It appears there is a script that may help: https://gist.github.com/ejdyksen/8302862

Not a great solution though - seems like a UI option to turn this off if it is as widespread as it seems.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#447

Post by nl »

derefr wrote: post #292
account-5 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ok, so the OP should, as a consumer, know about all monitor standards before purchasing one. Good to know.

Let's shorten that to: buy reputable monitors, from brand names you recognize. You wouldn't buy a no-name car.

This seems like bad advice. A little bit of Googling for solutions to this found this thread[1] which identified (old) Dell monitors as being one of the problems.

[1] https://embdev.net/topic/284710

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#448

Post by osigurdson »

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?

It is kind of funny that we either use macOS or Windows/WSL because our target deployment environment is Linux. We can't use Linux because something eventually goes wrong and people with deadlines don't have time to fiddle with their dev machine to get it working again.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#449

Post by imron »

teddyh wrote: post #345
imron wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for power management, screen sharing under Wayland and certain Bluetooth headsets

Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!” Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”

I’m actually trying to convince my current employer to let us use Linux laptops instead of windows ones (with Linux vms for all development).

My comment was in reply to someone saying Linux just works without needing to tinker, and as much as I’d prefer to be using a Linux based laptop, those are 3 things I have spent countless hours tinkering with to try and get working without success.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#450

Post by imron »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #261
noughtme wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker? After attemping to install dependencies and build GIS tools originating in the 90´s, I am so thankful for people who have published docker images of obscure software.

The students have to develop software using the framework, not just use the final program. I always found docker as a dev environment rather painful. Maybe I have to revisit.

> I always found docker as a dev environment rather painful.

I’ve found the following to work quite well:

Have a docker compose file setup that runs a container with all the necessary build tools and anything else.

Map home directories, /opt and anything else you want to persist as named volumes.

Run docker compose up -d

Use the remote development extension of vscode to connect to the container and develop almost as if it was local.

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