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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

#91

Post by alphabettsy »

zibzab wrote: post #80
gurjeet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Default keyboard shortcuts were one for me. Cut, Copy and Paste in Terminal for example.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#92

Post by _8j50 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #35
_8j50 wrote: post #32

I have found time to be the biggest factor. I use to have hours every day to tinker with Linux, I enjoy the tinkering personally and I can endure the lack of features. But at some point I began spending more than 8h on average on my work and really needed a break each day to not get burned out and take care of *health,on top of which I have a backlog of things to study up on for $work, any platform (including windows…

> Unpopular opinion: Linux desktops needs to be proprietary software friendly. As in accept blob installers that can install desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers. Paid apps should also be a thing on Linux. Isn't this already the case? I'm running Spotify and Steam games with no issues here. While I agree with your greater point that a system that gets out…

They have to do a lot of work coming up with custom installers or packages for distros. If you have gentoo+kde for example you can't just download a blob, open it and just have it work.

It depends on what you are doing I guess. I remember getting frustrated at windows too. Linux is the best at being configurable and controllable from an administrative workload perspective but not from a productivity or entertainment application UX.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#93

Post by pmontra »

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.

My HP ZBook 15 from 2014 cumulatively cost me some 2000 Euro considering all the upgrades and replacements. 2 1TB SSD, 32 GB RAM, at least a couple of keyboards (key wear after years of use.) So it's 8 years and going. If the benchmark is the 300 Euro supermarket laptop, well, I've seen friends changing one every two years and another one telling me that it's crazy she has to change her one because it's not even 20 years old (maybe one of the first Vista PCs.)

About my own laptop, given my kind of work (web development Rails, Django, Elixir) I don't see reasons to buy something more recent and faster. On a current project Rails test suite it's slower than a M1 75 s vs 50 s but I can live with that considering that we're not running all tests every time. Typing in an editor is as fast as any computer was in the last 30+ years. I expect to have to replace it either because of missing spare parts or some NVIDIA / Linux kernel incompatibilities in the next years.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#94

Post by bastardoperator »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #77
bastardoperator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. Yeah, well, I don't have to configure anything on MacOS when I plug in three 4k USB-C monitors. Now what? =]

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#95

Post by bsder »

awilfox wrote: post #75
bsder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Does your issue happen with any device, or specific ones?

All devices with USB 3.0/2.0 interfaces trigger it on all my computers with new OSs. Keyboards, mice, weird things like hardware debuggers--they all fail whether the hub/dongle is Apple-approved or non-Apple. It will work for anywhere between a couple of minutes to about a half-hour and then stop working until I reboot the machine.

The two Macbooks I kept back on OS version work just fine. Two other 2015 vintage macbooks that were allowed to upgrade exhibit the bug. We cloned from the working 2015 machines to bring the failing ones back online--this is purely a software fault. All versions of USB-C based Macbooks exhibit the bug--even an M1-based Air.

This doesn't hit everybody. But it hits enough, and Apple has shown zero interest in fixing it. This is the company that produced a laptop that plugging into USB-C on the right gave signifcant performance differential from plugging into USB-C on the left, after all.

I'm done. I applaud Apple for the M1 hardware, but I'm leaving the abusive relationship. Laptop/desktop is second-class and will simply get worse with time.

That's Apple's prerogative, but it's time I stopped paying money to accerate my own demise.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#96

Post by Sporktacular »

somebehemoth wrote: post #64
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 don't see how anyone that can afford comparable PCs or UltraBooks would be priced out of Apple products. And if they can’t afford comparable PC’s, then Macs are not affordable. There are many affordable non-mac options.

And then there are used options for both PC and Mac, if they're really keen.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#98

Post by goosedragons »

Nextgrid wrote: post #58
goosedragons wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> what can't you do? Latest example: I can't install a proprietary driver for certain hardware. The problem isn't just the fact that there isn't a driver available, it's that the infrastructure (ABI or API) to make such a driver is not there for ideological reasons. Software freedom should also be the freedom to decide whether I'd like to give up said freedom if needed.

You can install proprietary drivers for loads of shit. There just needs to be a driver. People do literally all the time for Nvidia cards, WiFi cards and the occasional printer or other thing. Most distros don't force Libre down you're throat.

It's no different on Mac or Windows. You can't slap a 3090 into a Mac Pro and expect macOS to do anything with it because there's no drivers nor can you do anything with an Asterisk PBX card on Windows.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#99

Post by smoldesu »

bastardoperator wrote: post #94
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. Yeah, well, I don't have to configure anything on MacOS when I plug in three 4k USB-C monitors. Now what? =]

Me neither? Pretty much every major distro (anything using GNOME or KDE) will extend your display just fine.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#100

Post by smoldesu »

awilfox wrote: post #89
smoldesu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for starters, Planner is also a native application written in Vala/GTK. The only non-native part about it is that you're forced to run it as a Flatpak (which is a bummer), but that makes it just about equally as "native" as any sandboxed Mac app. Almost to a comedic extent, Planner does copy a lot of the touches that Things has. For example, dragging the plus icon in the corner to a folder will create a new tas…

Forced to run it as a Flatpak would have been a dealbreaker for me since Flatpak apps don't support Power and my main desktop was the libre Talos II. Looks like it is missing deadline support, otherwise you are right that it is almost a comedic clone of Things: https://github.com/alainm23/planner/issues/888

Yeah, Flatpaks really are a shame in general. I don't blame anyone for disliking them, and I personally stopped using Planner after they (seemingly intentionally) broke support for native installation.

As for deadlines, my strategy was to simply put tasks on the day they were due, since they would be aggregated in lists regardless of when they were dated. However, I can't deny it's missing the feature.

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