Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Welcome (back) to Macintosh

take.surf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 276 posts

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#251

Post by tempodox »

projektfu wrote: post #26

I was a big Mac user. I had a IIcx and an LC, and I evangelized it even when apple stock was $0.95 and the wolves were at the door. I couldn't afford a PowerMac at the time, but I generally used them at the university when I could. I had a desk lamp iMac, then bought the first big screen iMac, which lasted me quite a while. I really liked everything up to Snow Leopard, probably a little beyond that, too. But in a lon…

> I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.

Sadly, they’re not going out of their way. It’s fully in the way of beancounters in harvesting mode. Apple has become a lawnmower, just like any other megacorp.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#252

Post by subterrane »

commandersaki wrote: post #74
subterrane wrote: post #42

Tahoe has this really cool clipboard history feature that just does not work on my work laptop. Maybe some corporate keep-me-safe-ware is preventing it from working but my third-party app, Maccy, has no problem at all, so I guess it's just Apple being Apple these days. I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to…

You need to make sure Files is being indexed, I think the Documents directory indexing, for the clipboard history to work.

Yeah, I've toggled that off and on trying to get it to work. I just checked it again to make sure and it's on. It works on my personal laptop but not my work laptop. I think there's some corporate policy or something that might be blocking it.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#253

Post by hedora »

dotancohen wrote: post #201
hedora wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

logind partially replaces things like xdm.

My machine has elogind and slim running (devuan default behavior), and from what I can tell this gives you the same functionality as xdm used to, but worse.

I'm not sure why things got split into two subsystems, but I guess logind is essentially required in systemd systems. I remember there were a bunch of bugs where systemd would do stuff like unexpectedly force-kill background processes, and rm -rf home directories, etc, etc.

I think those bugs had something to do with logind, but I'm not sure.

Again, I just see weird vestigial stubs on my machine, not the underlying multi-decade train wreck.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#254

Post by TimTheTinker »

nl wrote: post #237
card_zero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?

Not often enough for me to really notice. I use my MBP around 10-12 hours a day, maybe more. I don't love the finder but never really have bugs exactly. Time machine isn't great but it's ok. It gets stuck if you don't have enough disk space. The other things don't really affect me.

My biggest gripes are around Spotlight. Have you ever tried to search for a file or or create a smart folder that works? These features are horrendous. And Cmd+Space [type app name] used to be a decent app launcher. These days I often find it sits and spins and I end up using the Finder and navigating to Applications -- and that's faster than Spotlight.

When I actually need to find a buried file, I drop into a terminal. Then I feel sorry for people who don't know how to do that.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#255

Post by hedora »

chongli wrote: post #199
herdymerzbow wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 icon…

There was a lot of research leading up to 1980's-1990's UI design showing that people have a good understanding of physical persistence and the ability to remember where stuff is. This is why you can walk to your favorite restaurant or find your car after parking it.

Most modern UIs actively break spatial locality, so they don't work well for human users.

Imagine a parking lot that continuously shuffles the locations of all the cars, but you have a clicker that can make your car's alarm go off. You can walk towards it, and, although it might move while you're headed towards it, it is generally moving slower than you, so eventually you can find it.

This is kind of how Amazon warehouses work, and has the advantage that it can scale to infinite inventories and load balance access patterns really well (especially for robot pick + placers).

It also famously burns out human workers.

Note that the article spends a long time complaining about spotlight bugs. This is because there's no way to find anything on a modern version of MacOS. Logical directories (like Applications, Downloads, Documents and Desktop) are split into multiple physical unix directories. Photos aren't even stored in a directory at all!

The transition from OS9/Win 3.x to OSX/modern Windows is like moving from the house you grew up in to squatting in a never ending series of shopping malls and being forced to move on every few hours or so.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#256

Post by rheir »

Lost of people complaining about their Macs in the discussion can switch to Asahi Linux without much effort. I think you don't even have to create boot medium, and it's installed as dual-boot by default.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#257

Post by 7jjjjjjj »

pjmlp wrote: post #226
mrbuttons454 wrote: post #59

I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone. macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian. macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow. I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated…

I used to be on Year of Linux Desktop camp a few years ago with M$ on my email signatures and all, nowadays I rather take Windows and macOS, leaving GNU/Linux for Raspberry PI and servers, even with all the ongoing warts than the endless count of distros on Distrowatch, there is always that pain point that takes weekends to sort out, e.g. having a BRIX UEFI booting the desired distro, like I had to last year. > My so…

The Minecraft JE launchers for android don't use Android's JVM, they include a version of OpenJDK and that's what's used to run the game.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#258

Post by pjmlp »

7jjjjjjj wrote: post #257
pjmlp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be on Year of Linux Desktop camp a few years ago with M$ on my email signatures and all, nowadays I rather take Windows and macOS, leaving GNU/Linux for Raspberry PI and servers, even with all the ongoing warts than the endless count of distros on Distrowatch, there is always that pain point that takes weekends to sort out, e.g. having a BRIX UEFI booting the desired distro, like I had to last year. > My so…

The Minecraft JE launchers for android don't use Android's JVM, they include a version of OpenJDK and that's what's used to run the game.

Exactly because Android Java isn't Java proper, it is Google's J++.

Even after they dumped Apache Harmony for OpenJDK, they only cherry pick what they feel like from OpenJDK, relatively easy to check, comparing the AOSP source code with OpenJDK.

Then there is the whole history of what ART can do, versus the native JVM bytecodes, where some features are lost in translation, e.g. lambdas aren't nested classes, they make use of invokedynamic.

Additionally they are in no hurries to update Java baseline version, other than when Kotlin starts losing access to more recent Java libraries at Maven Central.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#259

Post by Derbasti »

ttepasse wrote: post #248
Derbasti wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason. We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python coul…

> I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under: Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething (Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastat…

You're right, I just remapped it with Karabiner, thanks.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#260

Post by tpmoney »

lynndotpy wrote: post #210
tpmoney wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 animat…

> 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).

So what did you do? Did you fix the DE? Again, this is effectively outside the skill of the sorts of people who would be "switching" to linux due to the issues with macOS or Windows.

And while installing a new DE is certainly easier than re-programming one, it's still dependent on someone else having written a DE that not only solves your problem, but doesn't introduce entirely new ones and isn't so fundamentally different to the user that they might as well have switched OSes in the first place. And if the user's primary issue was being forced into a major interface re-design like liquid glass, having to switch to a completely new DE is more of a lateral move than actually fixing the problem.

And to be clear, the fact that it's POSSIBLE for someone to fix a problem for you even if you can't, and it doesn't have to be the primary OS vendor is a benefit of using an open source OS. So I'm not saying it's not possible to benefit from this. I'm just saying that for most users, most of the time, the ability to "fix it themselves" is effectively as out of reach for them as it is using macOS or Windows because having access to the source code is only the tiniest part of actually fixing a problem for themselves.

Since my doctor analogy fell flat, let me try again with a traditional car analogy. A kit car is infinitely more open, customizable and user controllable than any car bought from an auto manufacturer. And yet, for the vast majority of drivers, buying a kit car, even if it was turn key and pre-built would do absolutely nothing to make it more likely that they will do their own repairs or modifications to the car. They will continue taking it to the same mechanics they always took their traditional cars to, they will continue to buy off the shelf parts if possible and do without if not.

Post reply on HN