Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
catfox.life
Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
1–10 of 183 posts
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#2> You could probably make something as nice and integrated as Things on Linux, but for someone as busy as me, it is nice to use what is already there.
I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things!
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#3> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac.
TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop.
What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#4> You could probably make something as nice and integrated as Things on Linux, but for someone as busy as me, it is nice to use what is already there. I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things! [0] https://github.com/alainm23/planner
Haven't tried it, but I sincerely doubt it's as good as Things (one of those products you just fall in love with).
Things pays attention to the tiniest detail in every single aspect, and it really shows that it's natively written for each of it's platforms, not some quick and cheap Electron crap.
I've paid for Things on 4 platform and I'm very happy about it. I have no qualms paying for good software like that, I just hope these people make more software for me to use.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#5For me personally I found macOS got more in the way than out. Besides being easier to install MS Office on it seemed like every few months I'd encounter some speed bump caused by Apple and I'd have to find a workaround. Plus it just really sucks at window management and you're stuck with the macOS UI and whatever tweaks (usually paid) apps can do. For my workflow it just didn't work.
I was also extremely annoyed at the lack of upgradable storage as my needs quickly outgrew the pitiful base storage. I gave up and switched to an older thinkpad that runs Linux natively and I now have 4 times the storage of the MacBook for peanuts and can easily add more for cheap. Slightly slower but feels much faster than macOS due to linux being much lighter.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#6> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac. TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop. What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
Sadly paying salaries to people to improve an OS with even average designers and project managers will in time produce better results for a Desktop experience. Economic incentives can't be beaten in this case.
Open source works great for developer tools and things that developers use, but for "consumer-grade" products I haven't seen a scalable business model.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#7> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac. TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop. What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
That user (and developer) experience will always reign supreme.
That you can have the most open source, extensible, low-to-no-cost, powerful operating system, and still lose out to a UI/UX that appeals to and is accessible to someone who doesn't know what an Ubuntu is, never mind how to install it. Apple took it one step further by not only providing this UI/UX to the "what's a driver" crowd, but also to developers.
For developers, they get enough nonsense over the course of their day from npm version conflicts, build failures from compiling on unsupported architecture, and trying to figure out why their k8s pods are crash looping. To then add on more headache from trying to develop and compile with Ubuntu outside of the described use cases? No thanks.
OSX (in most cases) just works: most developer tools provide a dedicated OSX package, you get the UIX benefits inherited from the "what's javascript" customers, and the hardware-software integration makes things consistently smooth.
Unless one of the big linux distros finds the money to make the experience more appealing for the "Java? Like coffee?" userbase, this will continue to be the case.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#8> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac. TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop. What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
> What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
Usability and functionality trumps ideology.
The Linux world has spent (and is still spending) insane amounts of time & effort on ideological battles such as software freedom or the endless arguments against systemd while commercial OSes put that time towards actual functionality and end up ahead most of the time.
I don't care how "free" your thing is, none of that freedom is useful if I can't use the thing because it just can't do what I need it to do.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#9> You could probably make something as nice and integrated as Things on Linux, but for someone as busy as me, it is nice to use what is already there. I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things! [0] https://github.com/alainm23/planner
Haven't tried it, but I sincerely doubt it's as good as Things (one of those products you just fall in love with). Things pays attention to the tiniest detail in every single aspect, and it really shows that it's natively written for each of it's platforms, not some quick and cheap Electron crap. I've paid for Things on 4 platform and I'm very happy about it. I have no qualms paying for good software like that, I jus…
Well, for starters, Planner is also a native application written in Vala/GTK. The only non-native part about it is that you're forced to run it as a Flatpak (which is a bummer), but that makes it just about equally as "native" as any sandboxed Mac app.
Almost to a comedic extent, Planner does copy a lot of the touches that Things has. For example, dragging the plus icon in the corner to a folder will create a new task there, much like Things. Each section of checkboxes also gets a tiny status indicator, and everything in it is drag-and-droppable. I understand your skepticism, but this really is a complete ripoff of Things in a glorious way. If nothing else, you can't deny the fact that it's more bang-for-your-buck being free and whatnot.
Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later
#10> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac. TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop. What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?
> What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this? Usability and functionality trumps ideology. The Linux world has spent (and is still spending) insane amounts of time & effort on ideological battles such as software freedom or the endless arguments against systemd while commercial OSes put that time towards actual functionality and end up ahead most of the time. I don't care how "free" your thing is, none of t…
Besides running the latest and greatest MS Office and Photoshop (which is entirely out of the hands of Linux developers) what can't you do? You can browse the modern web, do office and productivity tasks, develop, game, watch a movie etc.
Most of people's complaints with Linux are things entirely controlled by 3rd parties like specific software and DRM for crap like Blu-rays and 4K Netflix. Modern DEs like KDE and GNOME are extremely usable and functional.