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Return of the Mac (2005)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#111

Post by evilduck »

systemtrigger wrote: post #103
iaskwhy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a package manager useful? (I really don't know what's wrong with the default environment of OSX, if there's anything wrong at all.)

Speed and reliability. Take open source. You could manually find, download, untar, configure, make, install and track dependencies. A good package manager lets you do that in one command e.g.: $ brew install package_name OSX includes a package manager for proprietary packages blessed by Apple. It's fast and reliable but its curators forbid most open source and proprietary packages. It's called App Store.

Ignoring the problem of software availability, the App Store also lacks a fast command line interface. I can kick off a homebrew package install process and return to whatever I was doing faster than the App Store.app launches.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#112

Post by olefoo »

nirvana wrote: post #95
olefoo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot legally run OS X on anything other than Apple hardware. This gets really annoying when you want to set up a headless browser testing cluster because you can't virtualize any of the Mac OS's you might be targeting.

Well, you can set up some headless mac minis and run a variety of virtualized OS X instances on them. I personally don't see the advantage of using other hardware, Apple hardware is a better value to me. (I value reliability over lower initial price, and I don't find generic PC components to be cheaper for the same thing, nor to have adequate reliability. )

That's pretty much what I've done when I needed to, don't get me wrong, I like Apple laptops and will be replacing my recently stolen Macbook Pro as soon as my budget allows; but being unable to launch an OS X vm is an inconvenience at times, and a completely unnecessary limitation.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#113

Post by iaskwhy »

evilduck wrote: post #107
iaskwhy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I see, so you cannot use yum on OSX? I never realised it (or its packages) wouldn't be compatible.

No, Yum isn't available or compatible, it's coupled to Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS linux distributions like Apt is coupled to Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distributions. Homebrew/MacPorts/Fink are nearly the same thing, they just don't come installed by default on OSX.

Got it! Thank you!

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#114

Post by maguay »

revorad wrote: post #36
pclark wrote: post #8

I have always used Macs and good lord, the days of Mac OS X being out but the processors not being Intel were truly some of the most embarrassing years for Apple computing. I remember owning (and loving - for some reason) an iBook G3 that was basically unusable for a few months whilst I awaited more RAM for it. I think this was when their laptops had 64Mb RAM but Mac OS X really needed 512Mb. And remember when Mac OS…

One important thing that might be important for a lot of people to ditch their PCs in favour of an iPad is a decent Office app (Word and Excel mainly). It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. Does anyone here know and use a good iPad Office app, that I can recommend to people? The store reviews of the top apps don't seem too encouraging.

iWork. The iWork apps on the iPad are excellent, and would cover way more than most users would ever need. I'm still in college and have to send in Word formatted documents, but I've written several essays, fully formatted, in Word format from Pages on iPad. It's excellent. The other iOS Office apps are rather lacking, but Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are easily some of the best office apps I've ever touched. Sure, there are more features in Word, and there are more features in the Mac version of Pages. But the iPad edition is more than plenty for most uses. It honestly blew me away when I first tried it after struggling with QuickOffice on an iPod touch.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#115

Post by bostonpete »

officemonkey wrote: post #101
akent wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Results of a HN poll from a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726 Total responses: 1539 Linux: 564 (36.65%) Mac: 557 (36.19%) Windows: 365 (23.72%) Other: 53 (3.44%)

Polls can be aspirational. I'd rely more on the server logs say.

Well, I would have answered Linux on that poll, because I use it as my primary work environment. But I almost exclusively use Windows for web browsing. Maybe I'm atypical though.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#116

Post by joelhaasnoot »

parenthesis wrote: post #104
js2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line. Standard emacs keybindings work almost everywhere in OS X. But, you can also rebind the home/end keys - http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Edit: On a Macbook Pro, home/end are fn-left/right-arrow and page-up/down are fn-up/down-arrow.

>>> Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line. Alternatively: Command+← and Command+→ .

Don't have the iMac anymore, but what made matters worse was that I switched Control and Command to make more of my shortcuts work. Command+C or Command+V isn't a very natural finger movement on the Mac keyboard I had. Ctrl+V fits much better and matched up many more (Windows) keyboard shortcuts.

But it made shortcut listings more confusing, because that would become Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ (which I'm pretty sure I tried in Terminal but would always skip to the end of the command line, not the end of the screen line). The only keyboard shortcut that hurt after switching command and ctrl was in chrome. Chrome's History is Ctrl+H on windows, but Command-Y on mac, due to Command+H hiding the current window. That got me every time.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#117

Post by officemonkey »

bostonpete wrote: post #115
officemonkey wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polls can be aspirational. I'd rely more on the server logs say.

Well, I would have answered Linux on that poll, because I use it as my primary work environment. But I almost exclusively use Windows for web browsing. Maybe I'm atypical though.

Not really. I do most of my HackerNews surfing at home on OS X, but I spend most of my workday on Windows.
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