* Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences?
* The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up).
* brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise.
* The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator.
It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.
Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
It can be used for free until you decide to buy it.
> alt tab is broken and non configurable
Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying?
Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want.
Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
> brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good.
Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/
> The programs from Apple are all terrible.
Which ones, and how, exactly?
Cmd-` to change between windows within an Application is a behaviour I don't like and prefer Cmd-tab to cycle through all windows. Gnome defaults to the same thing as Finder but it's possible to change the behaviour.
>Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/
I've taken a look at guix and it's promising.
> Which [of Apple's programs are terrible], and how, exactly?
Well since I stopped using a lot of these programs where possible, my opinions may be out of date. But Quicktime player doesn't play most files. It's slow. It hangs. It's all around worse than VLC and MPV. And you used to have to pay to upgrade it to do things that other players do for free. And why can't it play DVDs? Or can it? If so, why is there a separate DVD player? (Rhetorical questions; I don't care since I don't use either program).
App Store is outrageously slow to do anything. 14 seconds to check for updates? wtf? (server backend and not gui issue, but part of UX). I had XCode update fail at downloading the 3 or 5 GB ball of mud. Instead of resuming the download or checking the hash of the file to make sure it wasn't corrupt, it just tried to download 5GB again.
XCode takes up 5GB and seems to be required for some particular development work. It's not really appropriate for Mac Book Airs with their small ssds. So I just don't do that work or try to use a Linux VM.
Facetime just doesn't work 3/5 times.
Preview is alright for reading PDFs, but you can't look at an image in a directory and press a hotkey to see the next image in the directory (as least, I haven't seen how); eog does this.
Mail is an absolute pile of garbage. The threading is confusing as hell. It's soooo slooooooow. Then it hangs when pulling in sysadmin style alert folders (with thousands of mails). Deleting mails is also very very slow (i.e. cleaning out said mailbox takes days). Instead of pushing operations to a background thread it where you can see the progress like in Thunderbird or whatever, it just beachballs. And for some reason, if you want to attach Calendar to an online account you have to do it through Mail (wtf) and if you don't want Mail to be used for the Mail then you have to configure the account correctly. Some people may be tricked into subjecting themselves to the pain of using Mail. :(
With Mail being so terrible, one ends up using Thunderbird or Outlook which have Calendars integrated. So Calendar becomes superfluous. Which is a shame because it works alright with online calendars, but it doesn't seem to have the integration to help plan anything with people.
I don't understand why Notes, Reminders, and Stickies all exist. Reminders should be rolled into Calendar. Notes allegedly integrates with Google but I don't see anything from my Google Keep account in my local Notes hierarchy. And is Notes supposed to compete with OneNote? They've a lot of catching up to do.
Then there's a lot of programs that I haven't opened in a decade since they used to be terrible (iTunes can't even play ogg out of the box, wtf) or I just don't have a use (photobox, game center, imessages). I used to have Pages and Numbers but I don't remember being impressed with them. From what I read, I haven't missed anything by not using them. But if they're free now, why aren't they installed by default for people who might want to write a document?
And if I've signed on to App Store with my icloud id (which needs a credit card to get the free updates, wtf!?), why is there no single sign on? Why do Game Center and Facetime and iMessages prompt me for iCloud credentials? I guess so I can sign in with different accounts (corp vs. personal?) But keychain access doesn't prompt me. So maybe keychain isn't backed up automatically to the cloud... :(
Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2.
Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra.
I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
> For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far.
Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize.
> And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
But we should talk about it if we're here...
After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet.
> Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize.
In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway.
>But we should talk about it if we're here...
Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work.
First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way).
My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions.
From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available."
So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work.
And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible.
My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity.
Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
If only we could exile the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs to a desert island, the state of the Linux desktop would be … well, probably not as good but at least it'd be a much more collegial community.
To get back to the original topic: the attitudes of the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs reminds me of that of the OpenBSD devs, with the exception that the OpenBSD guys are generally right, just socially inept in how they convey their message.
I wouldn't judge them that harshly, but the kerfuffles had the effect of splitting the Linux community into those who embrace progress and those who shun it. Sadly, most of the experienced went the latter way because the progressive path was full of cranks.
> To get back to the original topic: the attitudes of the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs reminds me of that of the OpenBSD devs, with the exception that the OpenBSD guys are generally right, just socially inept in how they convey their message.
Most of this, in my experience, comes from sticking to a very strong opinion that is heavily based on ideals. The further apart from the real and existing world these ideals are, the more caution should be taken when implementing them. Otherwise you will be placing a huge turd on someone's desk. During work hours. On a deadline.
I think this is the main problem with the attitude that the Gnome and systemd devs have. The Canonical devs took their ideals at least closer from a working model (OS X) and they were (I assume) motivated by pragmatism.
The OpenBSD devs base their ideals probably closer to their own experience. That makes it more likely to be right.
- random failures to mount network shares,
- drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working,
- the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen
that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.
I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽).
I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.