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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

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Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#431

Post by Anthony-G »

bdcravens wrote: post #388
roadnottaken wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cygwin

Still runs in the Windows terminal, right? Small as it seems, one of the first things to push me to OSX from Windows was the ease of copying and pasting in and out of the terminal.

For the past couple of years, it uses mintty (based on the same code as putty) as its default terminal. I find mintty to be a very fine terminal emulator and is easily configurable; its default colour for rendering ANSI Blue was too dark for my liking but I was able to change it to the same colour that xterm uses.

It supports UTF8, 256 colours; copy-pasting is simple and easy. I suppose the only mainstream feature it's lacking is tabs -- but that doesn't bother me.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#432

Post by Anthony-G »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #312
roadnottaken wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cygwin

I use Cygwin on a regular basis. It's basically indispensible, because it's the only thing that does what it does. But I get the strong impression that it was designed to punish Windows users. Just off the top of my head: * It has no idea about Windows file system conventions. IIRC, the default install directory is "C:\Cygwin". * The "default" install is super bare-bones, and missing a lot of pretty basic Unix utils.…

I look in on the Cygwin users' mailing list every now and again and I have a lot of respect for the devs and how they run their project, finding a usable middle ground between Windows and Linux (Cygwin at its core is a DLL that emulates POSIX and Linux-specific system calls).

The installer being the package manager threw me when I first started using Cygwin. However, when I researched the issue, I can see how the choice made sense. Unlike a Linux system, you can't upgrade the Cygwin DLL in-place while it's running.

apt-cyg [1] is a nice simple bash script for managing Cygwin packages. I find very useful for avoiding the GUI installer when I just need to add or remove a few packages. For software that doesn't require an upgrade of the Cygwin DLL, they can be installed / removed from inside Cygwin itself.

[1] https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#434

Post by toakmu »

uherdwong wrote: post #230
orangecat wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat, basically using Macs for the hardware at this point. Nothing that I'm aware of comes close to MacBooks in build quality, display, and lack of driver issues, and the retina iMac is a fantastic developer workstation. But not being an iOS user, I find most of the changes since 10.6 either irrelevant or negative.

Really? I'm waiting for a new Razer Blade 14" to show up with 970m graphics. Even the old one with 870m stomps a mudhole in a macbook these days man.

The Razer has a much worse processor, half the RAM, half the storage, half the battery life, and it's heavier than the 15" MacBook even though it's only 14". And according to reviews "it runs incredibly hot".

Not exactly "stomping a mudhole" is it?

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#435

Post by smikims »

davvid wrote: post #426
smikims wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how it is on Macs (probably worse), but on my Lenovo Y50 I've had a lot of issues getting my nVidia card to work properly. First I tried Arch Linux, which I had been using on my previous machine for about 2 years now, and no matter what I did I couldn't get my nVidia card to work properly, even with the nvidia-beta package from the AUR. So then I tried Ubuntu, thinking that would be the "easy" distro. It…

If you export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 in your environment then that should force the nvidia driver to sync to vblank.

That was one of the things I tried and somehow it still didn't do it. Setting it in the individual games' settings didn't to it either. I'll try one more time though.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#436

Post by no_future »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #371
0xCMP wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm adding this here because you gave me the idea indirectly... but what if there were a Linux Distro that targeted OS X? To make a Linux or FreeBSD version of the "Just Works" experience?

That would be Elementary OS. It's gotten pretty awesome lately. I would highly recommend Elementary to jaded OS X users in particular, along with anyone else with an inclination to use Linux. I regularly and happily use all major OSs for coding, design and other super serious stuff, and this is my favorite Linux distro by far. http://elementaryos.org/

I tried Elementary about a year ago and uninstalled it after a couple hours. Everything was ridiculously dumbed down and unproductive, worse than anything I've ever seen. I'm a devout OSX user and contrary to popular opinion I don't find anything easier to use about OSX over Windows for general usage.

Has it gotten better since then?

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#437

Post by chmars »

According to the article, the author was using Firefox, a non-Apple mail client and a non-Apple terminal client. That made quitting OS X of course not that difficult …

In spite of all annoying and time-consuming issues with OS X, I could not afford to switch to Linux, especially not in a business context. SaaS could help, however, the leading SaaS provider are US-based and I can therefore not used them for legal reasons, e.g., due to data privacy legislation.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#438

Post by lotyrin »

Raptor22 wrote: post #398
overgard wrote: post #319

Apple has been doing a really bad job at UX for the last few years. (Disclaimer: I say this as a person where I'm currently surrounded by two iMac's, a macbook pro, and an iphone, so I'm not exactly a hater). The weird thing is I don't even know what they're going for. There are two trends I've seen: 1) Be more like iOS (for example, the dumb reverse scroll (wait sorry, "natural" scroll") and removing things like UI…

Am I the only one here who likes natural scrolling?

Decades of Windows and Linux I figured I'd give it a shot for a few weeks before I would eventually give up on it.

It took maybe a day, I'm hooked and now everything else is weird.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#439

Post by lordbusiness »

mattkrea wrote: post #155
lordbusiness wrote: post #118

Truth be told, I'm feeling the same urges. The golden age of my Mac was years ago. I switched to Macs in 2002, and had the most amazing computing period of my life between then and approximately 2011. Since then the random reboots of both the uncontrolled variety and controlled (though forced through needing to kick a random weird glitch) variety have increased to the point that I no longer consider my computer to be…

The librem 15 is what I'm going to as a free software laptop to replace my air

Thanks - I'll check this out!

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#440

Post by lordbusiness »

Decade wrote: post #397
lordbusiness wrote: post #118

Truth be told, I'm feeling the same urges. The golden age of my Mac was years ago. I switched to Macs in 2002, and had the most amazing computing period of my life between then and approximately 2011. Since then the random reboots of both the uncontrolled variety and controlled (though forced through needing to kick a random weird glitch) variety have increased to the point that I no longer consider my computer to be…

The Librem 15 seems like a nice system, especially once the creator was disabused of the supposed merits of Nvidia for a free-software computer. https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop

Thanks :-)
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