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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

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Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#401
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry you had a poor experience By no means! It worked out for the best. > I think most would agree that such problems are quite rare compared to other OSes. Macbooks are very popular nowadays, but somewhat less so 5-6 years ago when I was diagnosing this. There were many, many people in my shoes all over the Apple discussions and other forums ("hunderds" from my previous post is almost definitely an underestim…

But in all honesty, can you name another manufacturer who does have good technical support? I have dealt with tech support people from Dell, HP, Panasonic, Lenovo, and Apple. They all have the same roadmap of denial: 1. I don't see the problem. 2. Oh, I see, that's a feature! 3. Hmm, not a feature you say, then it must be those pesky 3rd party apps you are using. 4. Ok, ok, it's a clean install, have you done all the…

I pay HP about 100 Euro per year for a next business day support and whenever something breaks in my laptop they either send me a technician or mail me the spare parts. In the last 8 years I remember the technician coming here to replace a worn out keyboard (5 years) and a screen which was developing some whitish pixels. The shipped me a couple of hard disks, one of them just in case the problem I had was related to the disk, and two new power units. No complaints ever.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#402
post #90

Admittedly I've never used OS X and have been a Linux user for years (so I may have picked up some things along the way that seem like second nature now), but I've not had any troubles that so many talk about. i3 and KDE do everything I need wonderfully. How much better are Firefox and Thunderbird on OS X? And media players and terminals? Because other than a calculator or an occasional spreadsheet, those are about t…

The OS X terminals, both the built-in Terminal.app and iTerm 2, are better than what I have found in Linux so far. Both do automatic text wrapping and reflow it on window resize, which is hard to find on Linux terminals. Also, neither relies on the control key for menu item key equivalents. Copy is Command-C, SIGINT is Control-C. On Linux, Control-C is copy everywhere except in terminal windows; there Control-C is SI…

> Both do automatic text wrapping and reflow it on window resize, which is hard to find on Linux terminals. Also, neither relies on the control key for menu item key equivalents. Copy is Command-C, SIGINT is Control-C.

I actually hadn't noticed this as I usually run things inside of screen, but it seems that there are options[1].

> When you use Linux, do you use key equivalents in the terminal (copy, paste, etc.)? How do you handle the inconsistencies with other apps?

I'll give you that one. This bugged me at first (usually doing Ctrl+Shift+C in Chromium, I've never done Ctrl+C in a terminal inadvertently) so I made an extension that calls me an idiot when I Ctrl+Shift+C in Chromium. That cured it fast.

What I like about Linux is that I haven't found something that can't be done - for example, if this bothered you sufficiently, you could remap Super-c to be copy universally - this[2] seems like it would work. The terminal would possibly need its own override.

[1] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24793/looking-for-x-...

[2] http://askubuntu.com/questions/10008/how-to-make-keyboard-wo...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#403
Weird, productivity was the reason I quit Linux. I spent nearly half my time 'tweaking' things to make it run the way I wanted, instead of getting things done. I honestly love Yosemite. Still searching for the "iOSification" people talk of though.

Meh, to each their own. It always amuses me though that people have to tell the world why they're going to switch to a different OS.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#404
post #242

I'm convinced there is a real productivity loss due to OSX's limited notifications system. On OSX you get a tiny little bubble in the upper right from your chat program and if you miss it, too bad. I've seen people resorting to shouting or tapping on shoulders because of this. Trying to do something as simple as change the font size was difficult or impossible. On linux I get nice big notifications. If I miss or choo…

> There are fixes no doubt, but this lack of "customizability" System Preferences -> Notifications -> [Application] -> Style -> 'Alert' Under that it says > Banners automatically appear in the upper-right corner and go away automatically. Alerts stay on screen until dismissed.

How about font size? How long they stay? Etc?

There is a very limited number of things to change in there is what I am saying.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the full screen feature in 10.7 through 10.9! Full screen in 10.7 and 10.8 did render secondary displays useless. But it was a new feature in 10.7, so there was nothing to reverse. You can't take Safari, Mail, etc. full screen in 10.6. Perhaps there was an app you used that switched from a custom full screen implementation to the system one, and so regressed on secondary displays?

VLC, iTerm (& Terminal? I think), Chrome, Firefox, ... Most things I used had some sort of full-screen mode that was then "hijacked" by 10.7's native full-screen mode. I say "hijacked" because even versions that were pre-Lion would somehow end up using the native "feature". The thing to reverse would have been the "switch to new workspace when full-screening" - or at the very least make it optional . Certainly not re…

Ok, I get it: you don't like how the system full screen integrates with workspaces, and you were peeved when other apps adopted it in place of their own implementations. Of course Apple did not "hijack" anything: full screen support has always been strictly opt-in. But apps would feel pressure to adopt the system implementation.

Full screen was an effort to make OS X more usable on small displays - recall that the 11" MacBook Air had just shipped. It didn't make much sense for media playback apps to adopt the system full screen mode, especially as it was in 10.7-8.

I would have loved to enable a system mode where full screen windows could coexist in the same workspace as unrelated windows, but this would have been a new feature, not something we could have achieved by reversing anything. And eventually Apple did enable a new mode, which was what shipped in 10.9.

Oh, and if you filed a bug, then whoever closed it as "working as expected" made a mistake. There was a (heavily duped) bug tracking the uselessness of secondary displays in FS, and it was closed when 10.9 shipped. I may even have been the one to close it, I don't remember.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#406
post #242

I'm convinced there is a real productivity loss due to OSX's limited notifications system. On OSX you get a tiny little bubble in the upper right from your chat program and if you miss it, too bad. I've seen people resorting to shouting or tapping on shoulders because of this. Trying to do something as simple as change the font size was difficult or impossible. On linux I get nice big notifications. If I miss or choo…

You can change to notification style to be an "alert" rather than a "banner". Alerts do not go away unless dismissed, so they cannot be missed even if you were afk for 5 minutes. That should solve the missed notifications problem.

It sort of solves it, in a clunky way compared to the elegant setup I easily achieved in linux...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#407

My primary professional OS progression went something like: Slackware -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> OS X. As with the author, I'm pretty sure I'm done with OS X. If I want to go back to Linux, what is the best path? Mint? Back to Ubuntu? Something new?

Back to where you started. Slackware.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#408

I want to quit OS X but can't until I get (as almost everyone else in the world has said): 1.) Laptop hardware/construction that rivals Apples. I hate plastic. I hate it. 2.) A usable trackpad. Apple has by far the most usable trackpad and it works well. Windows/Linux laptops force me to bring a mouse because the trackpads/drivers are essentially crap by comparison. 3.) Hassle-free wireless and graphics card drivers.…

Thinkpad - the only other laptop that gets as much respect and fanaticism as Macbooks. Out-of-the-box compatibility with most linux flavors. Very eminently upgradable and maintainable (we cannot, in all seriousness, even begin to compare the maintainability of Thinkpads to Macbook) Oh and the Thinkpad keyboard kicks the Macbook's butt.

The very first thing he said was "he hates plastic".

And keyboard preference is just that, preference. I personally like my Macbook Pro's keyboard to my Thinkpad's. Weird how opinions work. But maybe this guy would actually like the Thinkpad's keyboard...he should go try one out. Do Best Buy's carry them? Are Best Buy's still around?

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is the reason I don't use Photoshop but, instead, use Gimp for all my needs.

Absolutely, windows is still a disaster. For developers working with open source technologies, windows is a difficult platform to use. I was attending a workshop on Angular.js and rails where I had the misfortune to have brought my windows 8.1 machine with me. Everyone, including myself, who had a windows machine could not get going with any of the workshop material.

If you develop with Rails do it on a VM, even a headless server you ssh into and export the filesystem to your Windows editor. Ruby on Windows is an inferior experience, because most of the developers in the ecosystem are on Mac and Linux. The servers are on Linux.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#410
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have personal experience since my MBP has a SSD. Things page fairly quickly. It will affect the total life expectancy of the drive. With the new models of MBP that's a real problem. The drive and it's logic board have to be replaced. This will require me to pay a "Genius" to do that. Ideally I could just pop a few screws and be done.

SSD lifespan concerns are overdone. Tech report took 100TB of constant writing to get a TLC SSD to start showing errors, and you're not likely to do that. However, by avoiding swap, you're in all likelihood causing extra reads, which also degrade performance. I advise saving your worry for other aspects, such as reliability during unexpected power loss. http://techreport.com/review/25559/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

I'll let it swap (since I can't figure out how to shut of swap). I just do any heavy lifting on my Sager. A nice side effect is that I have to make sure my deployment flow works.
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