I really like Finder. It's consistent, reliable, accessible, and predictable. There are easy ways to see the real file system and windows certainly doesn't do any better in this regard (see: libraries and other namespaces).
Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
141–150 of 227 posts
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!
Hi, can you elaborate on this? Why not use Asahi Linux?
I can't speak for the person you've asked, but, I have an M5 Macbook Pro and Asahi Linux only recently got support for M3 Macs, and that support is marked WIP on most features: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
I assume it'll be a couple of years before Asahi is an option for my machine.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!
Hi, can you elaborate on this? Why not use Asahi Linux?
I'd love to try Asahi some day, but it only supports older hardware up to M3 for now and feature support is rather fragmented: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/. As it's a small and slow moving project, it'd also unfortunately mean living with all the bugs and quirks for a long time if you choose it.
What you could do instead is just set up your favorite Linux distro in an arm64 VM and run it with UTM (a popular qemu wrapper). Works nearly flawlessly! Very usable as a daily development setup. I connect it to an external monitor and keyboard and can't believe it's not a Linux box most of the day. They even got virtualized Vulkan (almost) working now. Switching between VMs and host is trivial and you have proper virgl acceleration in VMs without fighting a lot of nonsense like I had in the past with virt-manager on Linux hardware - if you like to develop in VMs like me, this alone would justify switching from a Linux box to a Mac.
Virtualization costs me ~10-15% in multicore performance - still a bargain considering how far ahead Mac hardware is compared to anything x86. Linux arm64 is very well supported by open source these days. Just proprietary software is often behind e.g. Zoom, Slack are still missing native binaries but you could run them in a browser.
Here's a more detailed experience report (though a bit dated) from another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508 https://blog.disintegrator.dev/posts/dev-virtual-machine/
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#144As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn. Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol
As a dos/windows/linux users my whole life, I got asked by some family a few years back to get photos off of a mac from a deceased family member. I pulled off everything I could find, but I was never sure I actually found everything because I basically had to just search for different image types, but had no real way to browse to actual folders where things were stored.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#145Since buying an M1 Mac at launch, I’ve always been able to find most things with Finder. Prior to that, I was a Windows user since school in the 1990s, and windows search was absolutely useless. So glad I moved to Mac.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#146My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing so…
>My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop.
I see people justify their Mac purchases this way all the time, but IMO it's just cope and not their actual primary reason for making that decision. I've never seen where the math actually worked out where the price/performance actually made Apple made sense.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, can you elaborate on this? Why not use Asahi Linux?
I'd love to try Asahi some day, but it only supports older hardware up to M3 for now and feature support is rather fragmented: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/ . As it's a small and slow moving project, it'd also unfortunately mean living with all the bugs and quirks for a long time if you choose it. What you could do instead is just set up your favorite Linux distro in an arm64 VM and run it…
Awesome write-up, thank you! This makes me want to try this out as well.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#148I don't get it. Finder is okay. Yes, there are some idiosyncracies, but once you got to know them (e.g. when coming over from Windows), it's smooth sailing - and much better than the Explorer. Why is seemingly every single person on HN unhappy with the Finder?
> much better than the Explorer In what ways? Tags are nice. Can't think of anything else.
I'm only forced to use Windows occasionally but the things that always annoy me when I do are the lack of: Column View, QuickLook, spring-loaded folders, hierarchical view, calculate folder sizes in list view. The worst is how folders sort on top, so you can't just type the name of a file to jump down to it if there's a folder with a similar name. The whole tree view is so weird with how it treats folders as this special different thing.
I do not understand how people can get serious work done with Windows Explorer, but I presume that's just because I'm not used to it.
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#149Each and every comment that is in agreement here is a bunch of former Windows users who wanted to move Explorer to Mac with them. I have used MacOS for over 15 years. Finder has never stood in my way. I don’t even know what “see the file system” means. Too many words to say “I don’t know how to organize my files on a computer but I consider myself a power user”
Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
#150The only real problem with Finder is that it doesn't show the current path anywhere. If it showed that, then it would be trivial to understand where to find your file later. Of course this is an option, hidden in a menu, so it is never used by the people who need it most.