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Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

catfox.life

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Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#71

Post by awilfox »

nmstoker wrote: post #43

All seems sensible stuff, the "it just works" can't be overstated. But the Apple Maps point felt like a stretch - Google Maps is available everywhere. I don't see much to suggest you'd need it as an app, it works great in the browser with hardware accelerated graphics, which it has had for 10+ years.

I've never had hardware accelerated graphics work correctly, and I don't want to have to use the Google ecosystem – that's an article for another day, probably.

When I was "all-in" on the libre ecosystem, I used a ThinkPad for laptop and Talos for desktop. The ThinkPad had just the Intel iGPU that didn't work right in Firefox, and the Talos had blue lines through everything in OSM because "lol x86 monoculture" meant Firefox's Layers didn't work right on Power.

I had graphics acceleration working in raw Mesa, so if there was a native app, it would have Just Worked – probably on both systems.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#72

Post by awilfox »

number6 wrote: post #65
Kwpolska wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explorer isn’t the window manager. And does it really matter it’s serving as the shell? What technical benefits would a split bring?

Right, they changed that 15 years ago. Splitting would make them more interchangeable and stable - crashing one part does not tears the whole stack down. What is the benefit of putting all the different functionality in one application?

Explorer was never the WM; you could kill explorer.exe off in both 9x and NT systems without affecting window management.

I don't remember how it worked in 9x, but NT used CSRSS.EXE for window management until NT 4 moved GDI into the kernel. DWM handles it in Vista and newer.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#73

Post by Tagbert »

awilfox wrote: post #62
vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

My concern with the Mac mini in particular is that then you need a display, and honestly, having an LG Ultrafine 4K hooked up to my Mac Studio, you really need a 5K display to get the most out of a Mac. I think 1440p displays work well too, or at least they did back in 2014 when I was using Macs, but I didn't see any for sale when I was shopping for an interim while I wait three months for the Studio Display to ship.

It depends on what your needs are for a monitor. If you are used to 5K 2xRetina then 4K will be a little off. I am currently using a 27” 4K display scaled to 1440p. It is not quite as sharp as a true 5K display but it works well enough. Until recently the only 5K monitor was a pretty weak LG. The new Apple Studio display does finally bring out a desirable monitor but I’m not ready to spend that much for a personal display.

Stay away from an old 2K 1440p at this point. Since Apple removed the old sub pixel rendering, those 1440p panels look too soft anymore. The 4K scaled 1440p looks much sharper than those.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#74

Post by awilfox »

goosedragons wrote: post #10
Nextgrid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this? Usability and functionality trumps ideology. The Linux world has spent (and is still spending) insane amounts of time & effort on ideological battles such as software freedom or the endless arguments against systemd while commercial OSes put that time towards actual functionality and end up ahead most of the time. I don't care how "free" your thing is, none of t…

Besides running the latest and greatest MS Office and Photoshop (which is entirely out of the hands of Linux developers) what can't you do? You can browse the modern web, do office and productivity tasks, develop, game, watch a movie etc. Most of people's complaints with Linux are things entirely controlled by 3rd parties like specific software and DRM for crap like Blu-rays and 4K Netflix. Modern DEs like KDE and GN…

I can do office and productivity tasks, but not in a way that interops with the tools that others use. It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't.

I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to the one that at least pretends to care about user privacy as a feature (Apple), rather than considering user privacy a bug (Google).

KDE has a lot of little nits, too, and it wore on me. Some of the ones I can think of are:

* When KWin crashed, the title bar font went from 12pt to 18pt. I could not fix this unless I ran some specific dbus command in Konsole and then immediately ran `kwin_x11 --replace` afterwards.

* Kickoff doesn't let you click "Applications" to go back to the beginning. I suggested it twice and even tried to implement it myself but they have layered everything so deep in QML I was lost. Apparently, they have redesigned the launcher again in 5.21, which released after I was gone, and now it looks like a bad copy of Windows 10 instead of being somewhat decent. Fabulous!

* KRunner took about four seconds to respond to input, even on a 16 CPU (Talos II) system.

There are plenty of things I loved about KDE too: Kate is amazing, Konsole is a fantastic terminal emulator, and I still use Tellico to this day – I even contributed the Homebrew formula so others can enjoy it on Mac OS. But the experience of using it as a full DE was just not all there for me.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#75

Post by awilfox »

bsder wrote: post #69
awilfox wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a follow-on article to my first one, where I spoke about the deep issues I saw in the Linux ecosystem after running a distro for three years. My thinking was by showing the Mac has all these nice things that make me productive, this can somehow influence and move the needle so Linux devs who follow my blog have datapoints on what they can work on. Perhaps some enterprising dev has already read it and is work…

One thing I would point out is that macOS has some serious bugs that, if you hit them, you have no hope and no option if Apple doesn't care. The particular one that bites me over and over with the latest versions of macOS is that USB 2.0/3.0 ports will die on macOS for varied and mysterious reasons with hubs and dongles and the only thing you can do is reboot. This was such a big problem that it finally forced me off…

That's interesting. I have multiple Apple and non-Apple C-to-A adaptors, and one even has a five port hub attached to it. I haven't had any issues on Monterey, but my main use case for them is external disks and a Blu-Ray drive, so perhaps I'm just not using it hard enough to trigger it. Does your issue happen with any device, or specific ones?

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#76

Post by awilfox »

sokoloff wrote: post #63
vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

I think the “Macs are owned longer than PCs” is under-appreciated. My previous MBPro was 6 years old when I upgraded. My wife’s daily as a freelance editor is a mid-2013 MacBook Air. That puts our total capital cost for that computer at under $10/mo. What would high-cost really be? $5/workday isn’t even high-cost to me if it was a daily coffee bill, but certainly not if it’s your main computing device.

Oh, my grandmother is still happily using her mid-2012 iMac, and my 2011 MBP is still kicking around for the occasional 32-bit only app (some older games mostly).

The problem is initial capex: you have to have that amount of money all at once, even if it is cheaper in the long run. Some people do not have access to even credit of that amount, let alone the cash for it.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#77

Post by loloquwowndueo »

bastardoperator wrote: post #42
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well- one of my main gripes was that I had to spend a lot of time and work getting macOS to behave like Linux did - so at some point I decided to stop wasting my time and use the real thing :) so “whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.” You’re not entirely wrong but it was far less painful than tweaking macOS. “ you can tweak macOS to your lik…

brew install coreutils Getting GNU tools on MacOS is super easy and honestly I don't know anyone using ports/fink. All of my development ends up on Linux machines, in rare cases I need something specific to Linux or my production environment, I just connect to a dev machine but for the most part I use MacOS as the primary desktop at work along with everyone else. For me it's all about workflow. I spend a lot of time…

Is brew included with macOS these days? It wasn’t when I did all this. It’s still one more command to get coreutils installed vs. what’s needed on Linux.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#78

Post by sofixa »

chrisseaton wrote: post #40
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #22

They left Linux because they want stability and portability so they jumped to macOS? I don't understand. Also: I just punched directions into GNOME Maps and it worked flawlessly and cast my entire desktop to my Shield TV via Chrome browser.

> They left Linux because they want stability and portability so they jumped to macOS? I don't understand. Which bit don’t you understand? macOS is stable with fantastic professional QA and support, and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does.

> and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does

That's a stretch and i find it unlikely, but it's not like we have numbers. However, macOS makes it hard to run random software ( like a utility from GitHub) with their code signing "security" stuff ( working around it is anything but intuitive).

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#79

Post by awilfox »

Tagbert wrote: post #73
awilfox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern with the Mac mini in particular is that then you need a display, and honestly, having an LG Ultrafine 4K hooked up to my Mac Studio, you really need a 5K display to get the most out of a Mac. I think 1440p displays work well too, or at least they did back in 2014 when I was using Macs, but I didn't see any for sale when I was shopping for an interim while I wait three months for the Studio Display to ship.

It depends on what your needs are for a monitor. If you are used to 5K 2xRetina then 4K will be a little off. I am currently using a 27” 4K display scaled to 1440p. It is not quite as sharp as a true 5K display but it works well enough. Until recently the only 5K monitor was a pretty weak LG. The new Apple Studio display does finally bring out a desirable monitor but I’m not ready to spend that much for a personal di…

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the 4K scaled to 1440p as well. Scaled to 1080p looked so crisp and well-rendered I could cry, but the UI elements were far too big.

My main use case for the Mac Studio is photography and video editing, so an Apple Studio display is definitely on my wish list.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#80

Post by zibzab »

gurjeet wrote: post #21
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17

“Platform A has these features I find convenient therefore I migrated from platform B which doesn’t have them”. That’s all this article is. Platform B might as well have been windows. I’m not sure why everyone is reading it as a dismissal of desktop Linux as a concept. I tried a Mac for a while, found it too restrictive, moved back to Linux on the desktop - doesn’t mean the Mac sucks or anything, just wasn’t right fo…

I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking. Trust me, you can tweak macOS to your liking, as well. I used to be a Linux lover, but after trying for almost a decade, for my desktop needs, I’ve given up on Linux, and adopted macOS. macOS is a POSIX environment, and you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you, if you want.

> but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.

Serious question: why do you assume that?

My "tweaking" of a new Ubuntu machine is normally limited to changing the background. I am busy getting work done and don't really want or need to tweak things.

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