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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

171–180 of 267 posts

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love linux as much as the next guy, especially on the server, but definitely not as my daily driver. It's too unpolished, especially UI/UX wise. I'm hoping the year of the linux desktop will come eventually however.

The UX is amazing if you ignore gnome/kde etc, which are just imitations of windows and mac. I'd say the true linux UX is in tiling window managers. Just like the terminal and vim/emacs, tiling WMs have a steep learning curve and an amazing payoff where the computer becomes an extension of your will, rather than something you fight. I really recommend you try them. That being said, they don't look pretty, but they ma…

Well, they can look extremely pretty. Just take a look at some of the submissions on reddit.com/r/unixporn

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel there's two levels of the constant fiddler, one where their fiddling is fruitful, one where the fiddling is not. The difference, I feel, basically comes down to how much you document, test, and automate what you do. If treated like science instead of voodoo, messing with your computer becomes one of those "interesting things to be learning."

That's how I used to feel, and then (documentation and automation or not) it totally lost its interest for me! Creating software is just so much more interesting than configuring somebody else's. YMMV.

Would writing your xmonad.hs count as configuring someone elses software, or creating your own?

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

Yeah, people still recommend automatic task killers for Android and it has never been useful, just harmful on speed and battery life.

"Automatic"? Or do you mean an application that makes killing tasks fewer taps?

Because the latter isn't that bad ... I have apps misbehave about twice a week; chrome, skype, yelp, google voice - they all need an occasional fresh start - a convenient way to do that I don't understand the objections against.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#175
post #137

This is interesting given that OS X is anything but a hacker's paradise. The platform is very locked down, discourages tinkering and customization, and given how expensive Apple hardware is, this is the least accessible and most exclusive out of the three main players. Even worse is when developers make it the leading platform for their software, like in the case of Atom, where the Windows support is awful given that…

I'm confused by the idea that a platform with a published kernel development kit could be considered "locked down, discouraging tinkering".

The kernel is open source, how about everything else? To act like is OSX is open because Darwin is open source is pretty disingenuous.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for linking to this, I just picked up a copy. I switched to a MBP retina two months ago, and have made an effort to keep it fairly vanilla and figure out how to do things in OS X... without diving into OSXvsWIN, let's just say I'm super glad to have found this add on. It'd be even better if it updated to mimic Windows 8's taskbar (popup previews of windows, mostly), but I'll take what I can get for now. Easily…

You might also be interested in Witch [0] which lets you switch between windows of different apps as opposed to only switching between single apps or between windows of a single app. [0] http://manytricks.com/witch/

I love Witch, but after upgrading to Mavericks I found that it was weirdly sluggish and tended to overshoot what I was aiming at. It also doesn't function with a lot of fullscreen apps (primarily games) and iBooks does ridiculous stuff with its windows that no app switcher seems to know how to work around. All that said, I'm still glad I bought it and I end up switching back and forth to the default app switcher because it's so much better in every way but those bugs. I'm sure the iBooks thing will get resolved and I think the sluggishness thing is eventually going to get cleared up in patch.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#179

If you are a hacker would you be running a Mac? I'll stick to Linux and OSS, thanks.

For me there was a time where I wanted stuff to just work, to get good battery life on my laptop and still have a Unix. I went Mac OS X for a few years (X years ago).

A few years later I switched back to Linux. Much better Java support. Better window manager. Multiple desktops (yes, I had something like that on the Mac, but it was weird). Much better file manager. Much faster (than either Windows or Mac OS).

I still love Apple hardware and their attention to detail regarding battery life, but you can pry my Gnome, I mean MATE, desktop from my cold dead hands. And Linux Mint at least has the Windows battery life (seems to be the only distro that does), so that's kind of ok.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#180

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

I agree with you 100%. I bought a new mac book pro 2 weeks ago and it took me about 2 hours to get up and running. Because OS X is linux based (BSD but the difference is not relevant here), a lot already exists to make these kind of things work out of the box. Personally, I need two things to have my setup working: - Homebrew (OS X only but it's a given to anyone used to ruby) - dotfiles My dotfiles are on github and…

I always got the feeling that installing Homebrew and running the associated apps that run under X but not natively under Quartz was a broken way to get apps on Mac OSX (unless it runs under Quartz now...?)

It feels like the "dirtying" of the native system in the same way that installing cygwin and a mingw and GNUWin32 on Windows does, just in order to get it more like Windows. Rather, I'd use the native utilities on the system and native compilers.

Is it just me who feels this way? Does any Linux user feel compelled to install Linux and then run software ONLY under Wine?

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