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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#81

Post by wamatt »

Wilya wrote: post #7

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351]. Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen o…

I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS.

At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder.

Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises.

[1]http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#82

Post by meaty »

revscat wrote: post #61
meaty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively. My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't w…

> 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 was unbearable because the abstraction was inconsistent when it came to:

a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.

(I know how to access the source files BTW).

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#83

Post by blibble »

revscat wrote: post #54
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…

> I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. You and I have had vastly different experiences. I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day. The default command shell sucks…

believe it or not Windows has actually had a POSIX subsystem since the NT days, and MS still provide it for Windows 8.

I'm not sure what POSIX certified means, but Windows is UNIX in the same way Mac OS X is...

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#84

Post by meaty »

revscat wrote: post #74
calinet6 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and that isn't actually the problem I had :)

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#85

Post by elsewhere »

Many open source advocates like Miguel a decade ago have really been motivated by two things: Their love for Open source as a concept; and their love for Unix. This particularly shows in Miguels great essay "Let's make Unix not suck".

And the Mac achieves 2/3 of that. It made Unix not suck. It provides most of the open source goodies on top (using something like brew). And it also provides the kind of proprietary software that simply can't be matched by available open source software (like most of the Adobe tools).

Although I can sense some bitterness in his recent essays, he simply acknowledges the fact that the classic Linux desktop won't make it. (However I think it may actually succeed even on the desktop in the form of something Android related.)

As I see it, there will be a peaceful coexistence of proprietary and free software. Free software succeeds a) where collaboration is needed (Webkit) and b) to provide the kind of pluggable modules that OO programming promised to deliver but never did. Just think of all the stuff on github that you probably pull into your projects all the time.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#86

Post by elsewhere »

kstrauser wrote: post #75
elsewhere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is almost impossible to install software by independent software vendors. This is not an issue for you (and me) but for almost everyone else.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#87

Post by dman »

larrik wrote: post #65
lucian1900 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TotalFinder makes it a lot less stupid. Not particularly expensive either.

The answer to every OS X gripe: "oh, I just replaced that (Apple software) with this (paid software)."

But if you have to do the same on linux - "its broken out of the box"

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#88

Post by kstrauser »

meaty wrote: post #73
kstrauser wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'v…

> 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.

Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.

> Won't play mp3s - this is rife.

All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.

> Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is?

I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat... then.

> 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.

"My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."

You know, I'm not even really that much of an iOS fan. I've been eyeing my coworker's Galaxy with increasing envy. As a Linux developer, it's looking more attractive to me by the day. It's just that some of your claims ring hollow and a bit outrageous, like if I were to criticize a Lumia 920 by saying that it crashes hourly. That just doesn't jibe with anything I've seen online or heard from friends.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#89

Post by revscat »

meaty wrote: post #82
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 was unbearable because the abstraction was inconsistent when it came to: a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract. b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent. c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This…

> a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?

> b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

What were you trying to do?

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

man mdls

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#90

Post by meaty »

revscat wrote: post #54
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…

> I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. You and I have had vastly different experiences. I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day. The default command shell sucks…

I wouldn't install rails on a windows box. That's like mixing acid and base together. Forget it. Use Linux. Even I said I have a Linux VM.

Try PowerShell ISE v3 if you want a shell for windows. That's actually a pretty scary powerful bit of kit:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4...

I think you are trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver by expecting it to be the same. Embrace the platform's strengths, not try turning it into UNIX and whinge when it doesn't work.

OSX POSIX Certified? That means typically "buggy as fuck but the API is complete". That's as far as the certification goes. They couldn't even get rename(2) to behave properly for about 8 years. Google it. So many little bugs like that shot me for ages. That and the fact the whole damn CPU architecture changed one day.

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