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Welcome (back) to Macintosh

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Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#191

Post by TacticalCoder »

dotancohen wrote: post #143
hedora wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do all my gaming and LLM inference on devuan. (That laptop should chew through 30-120B parameter LLMs, depending on how much RAM it has.) I don't have any of the problems mentioned by you or sibling comments, full stop. Up until about a year ago, audio was janky as hell, but then as part of the great de-Poettering, they switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I've had zero issues since then. Copy paste works. Login w…

> the great de-Poettering If I remember correctly, Devuan uses sysv, yes? Other than Pulse Audio, what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

> ... what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.

This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.

Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.

I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).

Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#192

Post by codebje »

MoonWalk wrote: post #128
codebje wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Mail, right click on the toolbar and choose customise. Put the "get mail" action where you want it.

Thanks. I noted in my comment the option to re-add it to the toolbar, but everyday users can't be expected to know this is possible or how to do it. Nor should they have to, given that mail retrieval is something that everyone can logically be expected to do if they're told they were just sent a message.

People who want to click a button to skip waiting for the next mail poll time (and who even know what that means!) probably can be expected to know that just about every toolbar can be customised.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#193

Post by hedora »

mrbuttons454 wrote: post #178
hedora wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably just dedicate 1GB for the framebuffer, and then let Linux dynamically allocate memory to it at runtime. As far as I can tell this doesn't impact performance, so there's no downside. (Older AMD stacks required a static partitioning under Linux, I think).

I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.

I thought I had to split it in the BIOS, but then I just didn't (this is on a 2025 machine), and llama ended up with the same available "GPU" ram either way (confirmed by running inference on it).

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#194

Post by trimethylpurine »

giobox wrote: post #187
trimethylpurine wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is not a good comparison, as I mentioned, because we're talking about Apple's OS software being bad for its users' careers. I don't think that's ever been the case for IBM or Microsoft. Anyway, the hardware is irrelevant. > If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case. Selling stuff means you have good marketing, not good products. Microsoft isn't better than Apple because th…

Given one can only run Apple's software on their own machines, whether we talk about OS sales or hardware sales, we are talking about the same thing. Are you really prepared to argue 25 percent of the corporate computer market userbase are sabotaging their careers? I'd argue thats absurd, personally. I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and M…

Also this IBM article predates Apple's abandonment of AFP. That's a huge kick in the argument. At this time, Apple worked for file sharing, at least. It had many other problems for businesses at the time, though. But less so for medium ones, more for big ones. So I'm still surprised to read that from IBM.

Here's more recent research to the contrary.

https://prowessconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PCs...

I don't go by any of this stuff, though. It's all marketing. I have my own data and experience to work with. And I've given some hard to debate examples where it's a problem for one's career, and it's not one their IT department, or whomever I'm talking to here can help them with.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#195

Post by tpmoney »

sivers wrote: post #186
lynndotpy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that MacOS doesn't work, it's that MacOS doesn't work _and_ you can't fix the things that don't work. You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us. This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have…

Thanks for this very important point. It often gets lost in the discussion. The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like. That was the breaking point for me with Tahoe. I never loved MacOS before that, but it never got in the way. Then with Tahoe, it got in the way, so I went to fix it, and found out that fixing it is actually impossible! That was the breakup moment. Sophi…

> The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.

That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers. Heck most software developers probably aren't even C programmers anymore. And even if someone had the competency in the language and low level system programming, do they have the time and the inclination to re-write the audio stack so that it finally works correctly? Or to fix the fact that even in 2026, sleep and hibernate are hit and miss? And then to maintain their patch against future system updates or go through the process of getting it upstreamed?

Most Linux users, and especially most Linux users switching from something like macOS or Windows would be waiting and hoping that someone else decided to fix the thing for them because they either lack the skills, time or inclination to do it themselves. And we know this is true because if it weren't true, all the various "wars" over the years like systemd and pulse audio and wayland wouldn't have been a war at all because everyone who didn't like it would have easily patched it out and moved on. But a modern full fledged OS experience is a mess of intertwined and complex dependencies. So when a distro decides to switch a big chunk of the underlying stack like that, most people either have to go along with it, or hope that enough people feel strongly enough about it to fork everything and make their own distro, and then they have to hope the forkers have the passion and drive to maintain that for them.

Yes, you "can" fix whatever you don't like in linux. Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#196

Post by hedora »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #191
dotancohen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the great de-Poettering If I remember correctly, Devuan uses sysv, yes? Other than Pulse Audio, what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

> ... what other Poettering software is in normal Debian? A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH. This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one. Not of course it's a…

Also, a DNS client and NTP reimplementation that have both had security bugs, the broken replacement for syslogd, etc.

After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.

I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.

Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.

Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#197

Post by chongli »

skibble wrote: post #32
dewey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment. Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just d…

I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc. I'm not one of these '…

Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#198

Post by wpm »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #14
egwor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did it today. It took me thirty minutes to fix the networking because I couldn't get Little Snitch to uninstall since it didn't seem to be compatible. Basically I had to reboot in recovery mode to disable security features (csr) to uninstall Little Snitch (via systemextensionsctl). This is the worst update I've ever gone through on Mac, and I started using a Macintosh SE.

It's a bit unfair to complain about your OS being broken by incompatible software that modifies the kernel.

As far as I know Little Snitch uses a user-space Network Extension, which uses a public API added by Apple to the OS specifically to help devs move out of kernel space.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#199

Post by chongli »

herdymerzbow wrote: post #182
chongli wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now. It really makes me miss Classic Mac OS 9. I used it from 7.5.1 to 9.2.2. I remember being so excited about Mac OS X when the Public Beta came out that I switched immediately. It really sucked and I went back immediately. But eventually Mac OS X got better and I…

"A computer that was so simple and so predictable." This is what cachyOS + KDE is giving me at the moment. Ok, so it's not totally simple and there are A LOT of updates. But it's by and large predictable. I never had a 1980-90s Mac, but I had an Apple IIe and an Amiga 500. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry. I have a…

If you've lived in your house/apartment for a good long while and settled in, you have an idea of what it was like to use Classic Mac OS 9 (and earlier).

It's like flicking a lightswitch or reaching into a drawer and grabbing a spoon without looking. Everything is always right where you left it. Double-click a folder and the window opens in exactly the same state that you left it when it was last closed. All the icons are arranged in the same way, with the same label colours you gave them, and each of the folders inside that folder open the same way as well. One folder might open in list view sorted by Date Modified while another opens in icon view with the exact arrangement you decided on, all according to the way you left them.

All of those folders open their windows in the exact same position, size, and shape they had when you closed them. This lets you quickly drill down through layers of nested folders, moving your mouse to the next one before your eyes can even register it on screen.

The effect of this extreme level of persistence is that you develop muscle memory for the mouse. No other operating system environment I have ever used works like this, or at least this pervasively (modern macOS still has this for the menu bar). Everyone else just gives up and relegates the muscle-memory control to the keyboard only. This is a huge tragedy! A Classic Mac OS power user works with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard, and uses muscle memory with both to fly around the UI and work very efficiently. This is especially valuable when you're working in software that needs the mouse anyway, such as art or design software.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#200

Post by ranger_danger »

mrbuttons454 wrote: post #157
thomk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you solve the Minecraft issue?

He found a sideloadable JIT server + VPN setup. It seems super sketchy honestly, and it's a shame that people have to go through this to enable a feature that should just be available. There is no legitimate reason to block access to JIT.

> There is no legitimate reason to block access to JIT.

Source:

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