Tailscale's new macOS home • Hacker News Board

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#261

Post by tass » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #249

bayindirh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of my colleagues have so many applications running at the menu bar, so they have to use Bartender to be able to have anything resembling a functional menu bar. I understand power users, but I don't understand these users.

Weird. I think I have about 4. Someone is confusing the menu bar for the Dock

Try a corporate laptop. Every stupid thing you don’t need except to know it’s running is there, but you don’t know it’s running because they may just be hidden.

Jamf, zscaler, virus checkers, etc. need to all go to hell with this crap. I’m glad Tailscale are removing theirs.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#262

Post by philistine » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #257

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).

Is that the tradeoff they make with the Nintendo Switch? I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch and it’s a very compact device. My Nintendo Switch 2 is also very compact, smaller and lighter than a MacBook Neo, and it can play AAA games at high frame rates (e.g., Resident Evil: Requiem) while the MacBook Neo struggles with 5 year old titles like Cyberpunk. This is a very comparable device considering it’s als…

If you cannot hear the fan in a Switch, I implore you to get your hearing checked. It’s not a noisy fan, it’s not a problem the fan is there, but it’s not silent!

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#263

Post by dangus » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #260

dangus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the fan in the Nintendo Switch? Do Nintendo Switch owners hear the fan or consider it a problem that stops them from making a purchase? I don’t know why people parrot this talking point about a lack of fan being a positive feature. It’s like a shared propaganda talking point that Mac enthusiasts all agree upon universally. If Apple added fans to the Air and Neo you’d all change your tune since Dear Leader…

Nice of you to decide we’re just parroting instead of thinking. If the MacBook Air had a fan, it would be thicker and would need a bigger battery. It would then be the same, aside from the screen, from the base MacBook Pro. You are 100% correct. The fact it has no fan allows Apple to reduce its weight and thickness. Thus reducing its price. You’re absolutely right. Fans in laptops are more and more a gamer pilled fli…

Removing a fan reduces the price? By how much do you think? Is the Nintendo Switch expensive because of the fan?

Is the Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 a thick device? They are thinner than the MacBook Pro, and they have more space constraints than a MacBook Neo.

If fans in laptops are just for “gamer pilled” why does the MacBook Pro have one?

Do you think Apple can continue to grow their marketshare indefinitely if they continually ignore the 900 million PC gamers who currently own Windows PCs? The PC gaming market is the only one that has been growing since 2021.

https://www.techspot.com/news/106371-gaming-industry-hits-wa...

The iPad doesn’t prove anything, it’s routinely criticized for wasting its performance potential with inflexible and limited software. Its performance limits are never tested because you can’t actually do things on it in comparison to a full desktop OS.

My phone will regularly dim the screen, halt charging, and throttle performance when I’m out in a sunny day during the summer. You ever been to Miami? I would actually be interested in an actively cooled phone if it existed and would accept a device that was thicker.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#264

Post by freedomben » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #219

richardlblair wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux. Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.

On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.

Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#265

Post by jpk2f2 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

lemming wrote: post #113

jedberg wrote: 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…

Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.

- For homes with close family (parents and siblings), I setup a subnet router and local DNS server on a Dell Wyse, making it one of their DNS servers so it can point them to services

- Yes, they should have their own account. However you can only add a few before you need to move to a paid version

- You can disable the expiry for nodes, which should keep it connected and prevent you needing to sign in again for them, for the most part

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#266

Post by butlike » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #176

mort96 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.…

Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!

Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items.

Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#267

Post by butlike » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #240

alin23 wrote: 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…

I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible? It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.

The notch itself is probably considered temporary internally. If you code a rule for the notch, then you're going to have to consider which hardware OSX is running on in order to determine if the notch is present or not for your "notch width calculation."

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#268

Post by politelemon » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

ed_mercer wrote: post #117

> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all. Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.

It really is very simple. Because people keep purchasing their products.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#269

Post by kangraemin » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#270

Post by veidr » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

bredren wrote: post #60

alin23 wrote: 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?

Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism.

But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.

I hate the App Store shite that goes wildly too far the other way, but I don't quite understand wwhy they couldn't figure out a way to enable the menu bar widget API in a way that failed if your app didn't also have a way to open via all the normal ways (double-clicking the icon in /Applications, asking Siri to launch it, etc)