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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#71

Post by jsvaughan »

This is ridiculous. The reason that things "didn't just work" in this case is surely that the OS was fiddled with to the extent that the kernel was recompiled more than once every 3 weeks.

It is hardly valid to compare that to a bog standard release of an OS.

If you are reading this and for some reason have not tried Linux, this experience is not remotely representative.

The laptop I am typing this on (Thinkpad, Ubuntu) - sleep works, audio works, camera works, wifi just works, 3g JUST WORKS, printers just work - better than in Windows, DisplayPort just works, USB devices just work - and I have been running and upgrading the OS for several years.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#72

Post by dunham »

larrik wrote: post #58
ultimoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.

And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how. That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.

Cmd-shift-G in finder. (In an open file dialog, typing '~' or '/' will also bring up the same 'go to folder' dialog.)

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#73

Post by meaty »

kstrauser wrote: post #48
meaty wrote: post #19

Perhaps I'm strange. I always seem to be going the opposite way to everyone else. I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. Power management rocks, battery life is good (8 hours on my 2007 Lenovo T61!), the hardware is damn cheap, the licenses cost me virtually nothing, literally everything I plug into it works, the tooling is pretty damn good, utils I wrote for Windows NT4 literally 14 years ago still j…

> Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works. I call shenanigans. > Email is the same everywhere, ...as with all mobile OSes. > all the apps just works, In contrast with iOS? I'm not buying it. "Apps just work" is Apple's selling point for their iDevices and that reputation wasn't just bought by their marketing department. > plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never…

No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well.

Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I've had the device freeze at least 2-3 times a week as well. In the year I've been using Windows Phone, IE mobile has crashed twice and the device hasn't failed once (Lumia 710).

Won't play mp3s - this is rife. The ID3 parser on iOS devices is a piece of shit: http://www.google.com/#q=iphone+wont+play+mp3s This has been known for literally YEARS and plagues all apple devices from iPod, to touch to iPhone to Mac.

Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is? It's not a Skydrive/DropBox clone. It's a fully blown 100% FREE offline turn by turn satellite navigation and mapping platform akin to your average satnav. It's pretty amazing and is a deal breaker for iOS:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/nokia-lumia-smartphones-get-maps...

Regarding Apple and Google native maps, see above again.

iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#74

Post by revscat »

calinet6 wrote: post #70
revscat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them. > After removing iPho…

It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages. Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.

If you know the difference between a package and a directory then you should probably know enough to right click.

That's pretty minor.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#75

Post by kstrauser »

elsewhere wrote: post #60
kstrauser wrote: post #29

So after Miguel did everything possible to fragment and screw up Linux desktops, he's now complaining about fragmented and screwed up Linux desktops. Color me surprised.

As if the shell was the problem! It wasn't and isn't. The fragmentation that matters happens at a lower level, e.g. library versioning, the centralized software repositories, etc. Which is great on the server. But terrible on the desktop.

I don't know what that means. I'm typing this on a Mint desktop and almost every app I could ever want is available through Software Manager or apt-get. I've also released a cross-platform utility that's packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, FreeBSD, and Homebrew without any modifications to the utility itself.

Linux is the one place I've never been concerned with library versioning, poor centralized software repos, etc. Am I missing something?

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#76

Post by 72deluxe »

larrik wrote: post #58
ultimoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.

And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how. That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.

Type cmd-shift-g in Finder or just type a forward slash in an open or save dialog to bring up a path entry window, much like the old GTK file dialog. To connect to a SMB system, use cmd-g and type smb://server/share

Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#77

Post by meaty »

calinet6 wrote: post #56
meaty wrote: post #19

Perhaps I'm strange. I always seem to be going the opposite way to everyone else. I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. Power management rocks, battery life is good (8 hours on my 2007 Lenovo T61!), the hardware is damn cheap, the licenses cost me virtually nothing, literally everything I plug into it works, the tooling is pretty damn good, utils I wrote for Windows NT4 literally 14 years ago still j…

"it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days." As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. OSX, meanwhile, is still Unix under the hood. I'm frankly stunned that someone coming from a straight FreeBSD background wouldn't value that highly. But your experiences with hardware, while I'm sure legitimate, do not mirror my own. I've owned two MacBook Pros (start…

As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.

Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems.

OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#78

Post by aaronharder »

larrik wrote: post #58
ultimoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.

And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how. That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.

Command + Shift + G might be what you're looking for, as a kind of replacement for address bar.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#79

Post by rayiner »

jug6ernaut wrote: post #38
rayiner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who are limited by Finder use Terminal... The people who can't use Terminal don't need more than Finder. Apple is great at hitting sweet-spots that way.

I really could not disagree with you more. At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser. Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that devel…

What could a developer possibly need to do which can't be done from Emacs?

ducks

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#80

Post by drewg123 »

I had nearly the opposite experience. In ~2007, after the birth of my first child I had very little time. So I thought to myself "I don't have time to keep up with maintaining a Linux desktop" and I bought a nice iMac, and moved from Linux to Mac.

The experience I had was that everything that was a royal PITA on nix at the time (web browsing, audio, skype, video, photo management, suspend/resume, printing) "just worked" on the Mac. Hurray!

But the problem I had was that the unixy stuff stuff I needed to do my job (X11 across multiple monitors, emacs, serial console control, local command-line tools, etc) did not just work, and was more a PITA to maintain on MacOSX than the flashy stuff was to maintain on nix. The final straw was when I upgraded to Leopard, and multiple monitor support in X11 was totally hosed.

In the end, I wound up giving the iMac to my in-laws, building another whitebox for 1/2 the price of the iMac, and I have been happy ever after.

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