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Welcome (back) to Macintosh

take.surf

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Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#201

Post by dotancohen »

hedora wrote: post #174
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?

Well, systemd, including logind, which was incredibly unstable for me under manjaro (basic session management was flaky). Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.

Systemd is the big one obviously, that's why I mentioned sysv. I'd never heard of logind, so I thought it was sysv.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#202

Post by giobox »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #194
giobox wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

The depracation of AFP (first announced in 2013) has no real impact on subsequent studies. Here's a more recent one from Cisco with a 130k Mac deployment:

> https://www.ciodive.com/news/Cisco-tests-Apple-MacBook-vs-PC...

The usual suspects like Gartner and Forester routinely run studies on this question too.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#203

Post by tpmoney »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #5

I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1. And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it. For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does lik…

It is generally "fine" but as a life long mac user from the 68k days, what it isn't is up to the standards Apple used to hold themselves to. macOS has over the last handful of years especially become something of a "death by a thousand paper cuts" experience. And I think the problem Apple is facing is Tahoe is such a fundamental UI change (and no one likes those, just go back and read up on reactions to the original OS X UI) that people are paying more attention to the flaws. The noise and inconsistencies of the menu icons, the "last 20%" cases where the liquid glass UI is actually pretty broken (drop down a long list of possible wifi networks with a window with a white background behind the list), the places where the UI just seems to fail to update until some background thread finally gets around to it. The fact that these are nits, but that the nits have really been adding up over the years is starting the wear thin. Apple has always been a corporation of cycles, and things have gone bad before and then gotten better. But years and years ago, the degree of attention to detail that Apple (usually) put into their software and products was the sort of thing you could point to and demonstrate that for whatever other flaws the system might have, the attention to detail really helped make the whole experience just better. These days, while they do sometimes still get it right, it does feel like there's a lot of software design decisions made by "warm bodies" and not, as the article puts it, people who "bleed six colors". Tahoe is the first time in decades of using a mac that I've actually wanted Apple to take a step back and seriously just spend time fixing the bugs. And I daily drove OS X beta, so my tolerance for buggy software in the face of incredible potential is really high.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#204

Post by mrbuttons454 »

hedora wrote: post #193
mrbuttons454 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Oh that's fantastic, I'll give it a try. thank you!

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#205

Post by mrbuttons454 »

ranger_danger wrote: post #200
mrbuttons454 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Show me the reasons why you can't safely deploy JIT. If it's a security concern, properly sandbox it.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#206

Post by jemmyw »

nsbk wrote: post #35
ordinaryradical wrote: post #6

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so…

I can't quite believe how bad Apple Music is. I will say this for Apple, when I tried out Music on a brand new Mac and it didn't work properly, I got to chat to a real support person who walked me through fixing it.

It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#207

Post by Nursie »

kevinskii wrote: post #20
LeoPanthera wrote: post #5

I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1. And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it. For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does lik…

I have a dirty confession to make too: I’ve been running Tahoe and Windows 11 on my devices, and both are working fine for the most part. If I ever switch to Linux desktop, it will be mostly out of boredom.

I have time for them all - I have a debian workstation, an ubuntu server, I mostly work on my Tahoe macbook and I run windows 11 on my games box.

Windows seems like windows. I don't care. I'll keep updating to the latest so long as MS wants to give me free updates. My Mac desktop changes looks a bit on each new release but otherwise it's all entirely unremarkable. Maintaining my linux boxes is a little more involved, which is fine, I enjoy it and learn about the internals. SystemD works OK, I don't like its philosophy or the whole binary logs thing, but I quite like the service files metaphor.

The last time I got annoyed enough to change anything was Gnome 2->3 being forced by an update on debian testing, which is why I now run Xfce on any given linux box. I haven't yet gone to Wayland.

Maybe I'm just easy. Or maybe it's all the time I spent switching between Linux/Windows/HPUX/AIX/Solaris/whatever in the 00s. I just look for how I can get on with my day and then ... get on with my day.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#208

Post by trimethylpurine »

giobox wrote: post #202
trimethylpurine wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

The depracation of AFP (first announced in 2013) has no real impact on subsequent studies. Here's a more recent one from Cisco with a 130k Mac deployment: > https://www.ciodive.com/news/Cisco-tests-Apple-MacBook-vs-PC... The usual suspects like Gartner and Forester routinely run studies on this question too.

They had deprecated, but still supported it for several OS versions afterwards.

Big deployment in that article. I would guess we can find similar size deployments from Microsoft to the contrary. Again, it's all marketing. I wouldn't make decisions based on that. You should be looking at your data as an organization and making decisions based on the entirety of your infrastructure.

And the same goes for individual employees. If you work in a company where most people are on Macs, where you're not the odd duck with problems, maybe it's a smarter move for you.

But most people aren't at those companies. And for those people, being the odd duck with problems that can't get to the file share, or the guy with slower access to files than the coworkers you're competing with, might be the difference between "That guy always nails it. What's his name?" and "Omg, this dude always has problems sharing files. Just go up and present it for him. This is embarrassing. In front of clients? Next time John should present."

Trust me, you would rather be John in that situation. And as a non-technical user, you're likely going to find yourself in made for Windows presentation situations more often. There are simply more of them.

Mac OS X Server is discontinued. Mac is just not for business, and Apple agrees, it seems. Unless of course your business is entirely cloud operated. That might be okay if your company is so big that you get Apple products and theirs or someone's cloud offerings for nearly free. But it's not practical for most companies of any size. Especially when you consider the delays caused by opening large files over the internet.

Non-technical Apple users think Mac is better for graphics. That's Apple's marketing. We're talking about large files.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#209

Post by jemmyw »

tpmoney wrote: post #195
sivers wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Does it matter? Generally Linux desktop distributions are made for the people who use them, who would tend towards people who will fix things. You mention distros but there obviously are a lot of passionate distro makers because right now it seems like there are more distros than ever.

There are often comments on threads like this that go along the lines of "If only the people making Linux desktop did X then they'd get more people". But there there isn't really anyone making Linux on the desktop. It's not a product. Even the products within it are built on the work of people with very disparate interests. It's kind of amazing that we get a cobbled together working experience at all.

Apple and Microsoft can focus on particular things, like getting more users, or supporting hardware they want to sell, or trying to get you to sign up to Office 365. No Linux desktop environment can have that kind of focus. So when you say it's not fixable to most users I think: well it's not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be anything, it just kind of is. Like coming across a mountain instead of a theme park - it's not a curated experience, it's not going to be for everyone, you might get hurt, but it's far far more beautiful.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#210

Post by lynndotpy »

tpmoney wrote: post #195
sivers wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS,

I disagree with this. For most users, most of the time, Linux is significantly more fixable than Windows or MacOS.

In nearly 20 years, I've never had to write a line of C or touch the Linux kernel to fix issues I've had on Linux.

For example, one of my big peeves I've had lately on both PopOS and MacOS are the looooong animations to switch desktops.

On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).

On MacOS, I'm SOL. There's no way to fix that on my Macbook (short of installing Asahi Linux, of course).

> 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.

This isn't a great analogy, but it's worth noting: Many conditions are expected to be self-diagnosed and self-treated. I don't go to the doctor for scrapes, bruises, colds, dry eyes, a stubbed toe, etc. By this analogy, Linux users are buying their own aspirin and applying their own band-aids, while MacOS users are waiting in line, dependent on someone else to fix these things.

I say this as someone who uses both MacOS and Linux daily.

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