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Tailscale's new macOS home

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Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#122
post #101
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co. Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?

I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.

Or perhaps the teams at fruit co found a way to claim that their overflow is an innovative new feature and not copied from some other designs.

While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software. Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drive…

> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers

All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.

Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.

You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.

One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#124
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

I’ve been solely mac user for the past 15+ years, and have no idea what this thread is talking about. I think, as the other person said, we make assumptions on what’s a problem for others, when in reality, it’s not a big deal.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#125
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

It will not only cut off icons but the menus for applications when they have a lot of them. There is no way to fix it except to change your scaling or connect a second monitor.

I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."

I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.

How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?

Or the butterfly keyboard?

Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#126
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment might be of interest to help you understand what Tailscale does that WireGuard cannot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064875

I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more convenient than wg. If you “barely know what a subnet is” go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don’t maintain 90 tunnels… You don’t need a full mesh. An extra hop or two, especially within a lan, won’t hurt.

I would recommend WireGuard as well, I primarily use it with Tailscale as backup. WG is straightforward to set up, and with LLM the knowledge gap is now nothing if you have trouble with it

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#127
post #27

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar. ``` defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2 ```

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.

My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).

Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#128
post #24
post #20

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want: access to my home server ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network) ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc) ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one i…

Tailscale will enable all of this. Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.

> ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.

My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).

Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-...

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#129
post #60
post #53

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??" No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my poc…

This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co. Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?

Probably the same response I just saw someone reply with in this very thread:

"You shouldn't have so many utilities running"

It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.

It only takes like 6 extra apps for items to start being hidden, it's really not that rare of an occurrence.
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