Live data from Hacker News

KDE beats macOS

old.reddit.com

291–300 of 308 posts

Re: KDE beats macOS

#291
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, I've been using Macs since 1987 and macOS in it's various guised for 21 years. > At the semantic level it's fundamentally mixing two separate concerns. Further, resolving this quandry requires opening a next-level menu and further analysis, it cannot be done immediately/visually. IMHO, this sort of thing is the objective definition of "unintuitive" in an interface. No, different to what you are used to. F…

This brings to mind a proverb, "对牛弹琴", since the Han Dynasty.

Yes, you are so much cleverer than I. Ad hominem is ad hominem, however you try and wrap it up or disguise it. Arrogance is an ugly thing to display. Sometimes, you have to Read. The. Fucking. Manual.

The truth is that you have struggled to understand something largely due to pre-existing bias. You had learned a way to do something and expected to be able to map that to a different workflow without any learning. It really is that simple. It made you feel stupid, and you are confusing that with something being unintuitive. macOS isn't perfect, far from it, but claiming it's unintuitive because you couldn't immediately scan a document is nonsense. Scanning a document in KDE requires additional software to be installed, which is also an option for macOS, but with Preview.app, it's already there. Lack of familiarity is not the same as unintuitive. Claiming things are undocumentented when it takes 30 seconds to find official documentation on that very subject is nonsense. Moving the goalposts after being shown something is a asshole move.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#292
post #216
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command. As long as you don't care about the fact that brew is slow as hell, or can't actually handle versions and dependencies properly (installed `gpg` the other day, it updated Python and SQLite and 50 other packages to the latest version, regardless of major or minor), yeah, it's a package manager. Kind of. It still boggles my mind Apple hav…

It's a desktop, not a server, you should only ever install latest packages instead of relying on fixed versions. If you need a specific version, install a version manager. I use brew with everything latest, except for node which I manage with nvm and it works great. Brew is actually my favorite package manager for this reason.

Yes, you should only install latest versions. That's not an excuse however for Brew to upgrade everything to the latest version any time you install an unrelated package. Even desktop software, especially for software developers, which are supposedly a big part of Apple's MacBook "Pro" customers, has dependencies and breaking changes in major updates.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#293
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mighty strange definition of "unusable" you've got there. These are nothingburger complaints for 90% of typical Mac users. Sure, they might be annoying for you, but most users will just shrug at that list and think, yeah, but I can easily watch Apple TV on my Mac while I'm working.

Trying to settle in on a Mac coming from Linux yields a ton of moments like > What the fuck? The window manager can barely manage windows! > What the fuck? The volume mixer can't mix volumes! These are the core functionality of the desktop environment. It's a whole host of absolute basics that are missing. This also extends to lower levels. The filesystem has huge chunks of functionality missing to the point that it…

Again, nothingburger complaints for the vast majority of Mac users.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How so? Finder behaviour is technically consistent, all things being equal, but it's inconsistent in practice as a knock-on effect of other limitations: the root of this is the (inability) to quit Finder*. If you never quit any apps you ever use, you could probably get consistent behaviour across them, but broadly speaking if you do quit apps you're not using, opening those apps will tend to bring up a new window.…

Are you sure the inconsistency isn't because you have QuitMenuItem set? With it unset like default, Finder will launch a new window in the foreground when it's run from eg. Spotlight, even if it has no windows open, which is consistent with other apps. The only difference is that you can't actually close it. When QuitMenuItem is set to true and you actually quit Finder, that's when starting it won't open a window.

> Are you sure the inconsistency isn't because you have QuitMenuItem set?

I don't have it set - it's got drawbacks (aforementioned Desktop icons) but mostly I prefer to run with defaults so I'm less annoyed at fresh installs :)

Re: KDE beats macOS

#295
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to settle in on a Mac coming from Linux yields a ton of moments like > What the fuck? The window manager can barely manage windows! > What the fuck? The volume mixer can't mix volumes! These are the core functionality of the desktop environment. It's a whole host of absolute basics that are missing. This also extends to lower levels. The filesystem has huge chunks of functionality missing to the point that it…

Again, nothingburger complaints for the vast majority of Mac users.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that comment. That macOS has an audience? Obviously it does. That the macOS audience is largely unaccustomed to niceties that macOS lacks? Of course it is.

How is that a meaningful or interesting defense of macOS? How does it enrich (or challenge) anyone's understanding of the ways that given a different context, macOS can actually seem not just alien but shoddy or incomplete?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using it since 2012 or 2013 across a half-dozen devices and I'm not sure what you mean by any of that.

You can 'rm /usr/local/bin/*' without sudo. Or replace /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew with something malicious. That's laughable and I don't know how it gets a pass from everyone.

> [Homebrew gives your user ownership of /usr/local.] That's laughable and I don't know how it gets a pass from everyone.

A big part of it is that Mac users don't generally think of or treat macOS as a multiuser operating system. It's a single-user Unix, baby!! (:

But even without that choice, malicious aliases for brew, or PATH changes and a malicious ~/.local/bin/brew would be possible.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#297
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings to mind a proverb, "对牛弹琴", since the Han Dynasty.

Yes, you are so much cleverer than I. Ad hominem is ad hominem, however you try and wrap it up or disguise it. Arrogance is an ugly thing to display. Sometimes, you have to Read. The. Fucking. Manual. The truth is that you have struggled to understand something largely due to pre-existing bias. You had learned a way to do something and expected to be able to map that to a different workflow without any learning. It r…

Perhaps recall the context of the discussion was "intuitive", which is the anti-definition of RTFM.

Documentation is an admission of failure. - Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Usability (2004)

Secondly, please accept my humblest apologies for a poor choice of proverb; a better one may have been 井底之蛙 whereupon the well in question is Apple-land.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#298

Several of the things listed are false (like the lack of ability to open files with your keyboard, which you can do with cmd-⬇) and app window switching (cmd+~)

If you say the author's issue is invalid, then please explain: How can you configure macOS to have a keyboard shortcut that also makes sense on ISO keyboards to switch between all windows of all apps in a single UI?

Please closely read my comment again - I said "Several of the things listed are false", not "the author's issue is invalid". The author would have had a stronger case had he not listed things that are just not true.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#299
post #136
post #20

To be honest I stopped caring what OS I'm running as long as it is not windows. I have a terminal open 99% of the time and I almost never open finder or Gnome Files. pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command. VS Code is basically the same on every system. Gnome/KDE/MacOS all of them have there pros and cons. Right now what wins for me is the apple silicon. I can develop stuff with…

> pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command. As long as you don't care about the fact that brew is slow as hell, or can't actually handle versions and dependencies properly (installed `gpg` the other day, it updated Python and SQLite and 50 other packages to the latest version, regardless of major or minor), yeah, it's a package manager. Kind of. It still boggles my mind Apple hav…

Slow as hell doesn't even begin to describe it. Running `brew update` regularly hangs (no output, even with maximum verbosity) on something for more than 2 minutes before moving on.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#300

I hate the Mac*, but even so, nothing on that list of complaints is valid. Here's an example of what I consider a valid complaint: the placement of a Mac's app menubar at the top of the screen, instead of the top of an application window, is wrong. Two pieces of evidence: (1) it leads to confusion with multiple monitors and (2) new Mac users invariably have trouble remembering to look for app-specific choices at the…

Fitt's Law is a factor, BUT I think the always-on-top menu bar made more sense when smaller screens were the norm. With a 4K monitor at the highest-possible resolution, it can take a loooong time to get the cursor all the way up there from the window I have tucked on the lower half of the screen. I'm not saying you're right, but you're less wrong than you would have been when low-resolution monitors were the norm. Th…

Agreed. The problem was murkier in the 1980s.

Another factor: there wasn't much reason for the original Mac team to think about multi-tasking. If the original Mac had supported multiple app windows open at the same time, they might have designed menubar behavior differently.

Post reply on HN