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Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

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Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#241

FOSS developers should simply stop developing good software for Apple devices. The absolute opacity of Apple's technical policies and their arrogant i-dont-care/its-your-problem approach against developers are quite renewed in the community. This ends up costing a lot of development time to developers who mostly work for free, who struggle to reverse engineer or debug what happens on MacOS/iOS, and (like Wireguard's…

Funnily enough, if FOSS developers abandoned the platform, Apple itself would make sure no programs could run after a few releases because they just love changing core APIs.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#242
post #67
post #21

In case the author is reading this, I recently started using Wireguard in Mac OS with the Mac app and the experience has been great. Not only is it much faster other VPNs that I used in the past, but compared to other clients (Forticlient and Tunnelblick), the overall experience feels much nicer, IMO. Thank you so much for your work!

> Not only is it much faster other VPNs IPSec is as fast as Wireguard. And there is native client in MacOS. As for bloated codebase, there is an OpenBSD iked rewrite.

Is IPSec as fast as Wireguard if I'm running it on a potato like a Raspberry Pi 2?

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#243
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's beyond me why would anyone willingly use an Apple product Final users don't see this mess.

Hiya! Former mac native developer here, moving to a new company. My new corp gave me the option of a thinkpad running windows or a Mac, and I chose the mac just so I could have a sane terminal experience, UNIX-like tools, etc. I would vastly prefer to use Linux, but unfortunately that's just not an option for a company-issued machine at this juncture--and in my experience it's easier to spin up a VM on a Mac than a W…

You should give Windows Subsystem for Linux a try. It's what I'd choose in your scenario.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/ove...

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because the reason anyone cares about this whole episode is that some people felt the need to play a white knight in the developer's mailbox. The smarter people will quit the Apple platform, and the dumber ones will quit the software whose creators refuse to put up with the Apple bullshit (plus some that try to put up with it but Apple arbitrarily fails their review anyway).

You're mixing up intelligence with morality, or something similar to morality. Just because some interfaces are bad and the company is anti-competitive doesn't mean using it is a dumb choice, you have to weigh up the pros and cons. Perhaps it's an axiom that the open alternative is better in the long run, but that's too long a run to really care.

It's gradually becoming a ghetto. They do somethings well, and at one time it was a much better experience than Windows, but I don't think I would say that today. When I replace my Macbook Air, it will probably be with a Windows or Linux device.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The builds your phone comes with are not, and replacing them with your own assumes availability of things like unlocked bootloader. And then, of course, applications like your banking won't work, because they require Google SafetyNet attestation for your security .

If your bank decides that your business is worth less to them than a compliance checkmark, that's on them. All my phones are rooted and it has never been an issue with any banking app I use. It's all about priorities. For some people, that's going to be the roman numeral name suffix dropdown in the registration form. For me it's the bank not telling me what I can do with my devices.

It is not just what the bank wants and pushes on its clients, because f them. At least in EU, they are pushed into it by PSD2 ("Payment Services Directive 2"). Even if you are happy with accessing the bank via browser on the computer, you are going to need the second factor for auth, and SMS isn't going to be it.

Because it is pushed centrally, banks do not have a choice. Hence, you as a customer, won't have a choice either, unless you consider not using the bank online at all as a choice.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#246
The following suggests a technical solution and expresses no opinion on the policy issues of supporting the Mac App Store:

Jason implies that Mac apps that use the Network Extension can only be distributed through the App Store, but this appears to be a misunderstanding. This page at Apple purports to document a way to build an app for distribution outside the App Store:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

Perhaps this would allow WireGuard to support the Mac more easily without having to rely on the App Store. (It still requires an Apple Developer account, but that's already a requirement for the App Store.)

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#247
post #237
post #215

Apple doesn't deserve to have such careful and detail-oriented FOSS developers like Jason, developing for their platform. He is genuinely wasting time in order to work around Apple's developer-unfriendly platform. Not that I should be telling devs where they should spend their time... but I feel like so much effort is being devoted to fix Apple's issues. > When I'm debugging these issues, I'll often times spend a few…

I wish Apple would just integrate Wireguard into macOS itself. macOS has a built-in option for VPNs in the network preferences but it's shit like L2TP over IPSec.

I don't think Apple cares very much about personal VPNs, only corporate ones.

The number of people who gate a mac purchase on the capability to speak WireGuard is tiny.

I now only connect my macs and ios devices to the internet via external VPN router/firewalls on which I have root; I can no longer invest the time to hack macOS sufficiently to permit me to ensure that no unauthorized traffic is leaving it.

This means none of my iPads or iPhones have SIMs in them any longer, as I take this approach even when mobile (gl.inet makes a travel VPN router with an LTE interface that runs OpenWRT).

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiya! Former mac native developer here, moving to a new company. My new corp gave me the option of a thinkpad running windows or a Mac, and I chose the mac just so I could have a sane terminal experience, UNIX-like tools, etc. I would vastly prefer to use Linux, but unfortunately that's just not an option for a company-issued machine at this juncture--and in my experience it's easier to spin up a VM on a Mac than a W…

You should give Windows Subsystem for Linux a try. It's what I'd choose in your scenario. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/ove...

I actually have been trying this recently! I've been using VS Code via SSH into a WSL2 container running on my windows box and it's been going surprisingly well.... but that was after a moderate amount of effort to get WSL2 working to begin with, which was partially complicated by my past efforts of getting WSL1 to do similar behavior. I'm also not 100% confident NewCorp's IT would be kosher with me spooling that up. I could be wrong, but it seemed easier to go with the lower-number-of-abstractions-to-get-an-acceptable-experience via mac at the time.

Though who knows! Maybe I'll change my mind and get a new machine :)

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiya! Former mac native developer here, moving to a new company. My new corp gave me the option of a thinkpad running windows or a Mac, and I chose the mac just so I could have a sane terminal experience, UNIX-like tools, etc. I would vastly prefer to use Linux, but unfortunately that's just not an option for a company-issued machine at this juncture--and in my experience it's easier to spin up a VM on a Mac than a W…

My experience is that Windows Subsystem for Linux has been amazing on Windows and just keeps getting better. I've also never noticed any difference in spinning up VMs. But anyway I get keeping with familiar tools but, I just disagree that MacOS is a better or even "sane" terminal platform. All the ancient GNU tools Mac ships and BSD-style "but Posix!" pedantry drives me up the wall.

Fair enough! I have run into an annoying number of issues that were because the flags for `cp` varied from mac to other *nix systems, which was very annoying to debug.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#250
post #246

The following suggests a technical solution and expresses no opinion on the policy issues of supporting the Mac App Store: Jason implies that Mac apps that use the Network Extension can only be distributed through the App Store, but this appears to be a misunderstanding. This page at Apple purports to document a way to build an app for distribution outside the App Store: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bund…

There has previously been inconsistency between the documentation and practice, with Apple staff clarifying things contrary to the documentation.

If this has changed for the better, it has changed very recently.

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