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Comment by erlehmann_ | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot you cannot do on a Mac, but that you can do on Linux. The point is that you do not see it until you have seen it elsewhere. How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac? How do you update all the software to the newest version? With a lot of GNU/Linux distributions, both is easy.

What users do not see, they usually do not miss. E.g. many users of OS X do not realize that some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point until they find out that “[[” does not work in Bash on OS X or similar: https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-python-container/issues/104

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> How do you change the GUI theme on Mac?

You see, that's the problem: Mac is opinionated, and this is the quality we most often praise it for.

Changing the GUI is functionnaly useless for any job. That means some folks in the Linux GUI thingy thought it was good to make everything a variable, not even a build-time constant, write configuration screens, and poll the value each time you redraw the window in case someone changed it at runtime. For every change they also have to test them with a bunch of GUI themes and write automated tests for them. Plus the added benefit that every line of code is friction. I'd say they're spending their time on the wrong thing because...

In Mac, it's fixed. That means as a user I benefit from not spending time choosing a GUI theme. It also means apps can rely on constants. Makes it worth paying a UX designer to interview users and choose the right value™. And this right value will be better than any setting.

- Mouse: I remember fiddling with xinput a lot because the UI never allowed me to set the acceleration. On Mac I don't even need to know where that control is.

- GUI theme: Ubuntu has a default GUI theme that is wrong, because it has big fonts and big borders, makes it look like a toy and consumes half the real estate of my screen. Not great for work, so you have to change the GUI theme. Mac is just perfect on those two priorities.

I think I have written about this some time back. Care to read it and find out if it is related to your assessment? http://blog.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/using-mac-os-x-as-a-sel...

Changing the GUI has a function, btw. Just yesterday I wrote a custom stylesheet for Slack because its developers chose “the right values” for people who can see gray-on-grey “contrast” well (so, not me).

There is some time I spend procrastinating, but during my year with Ubuntu at work I was really annoyed by everyday things, enough to suspend my task and fix my configuration, so I wouldn't describe it as procrastination. I didn't fix things I could work with (e.g. when I switched on, I would execute some commands in the shell to fix the mouse...).

Anyway we can discuss for long, but in the end I believe if Linux OSes had the amount of money that Apple has to hire UX designers, marketers and devs who don't mind doing mundane bugfixing, at least one version on Linux would become perfect. It was supposed to be Ubuntu, but let's hope it's the next one.

When I fix something, I immediately send it upstream, did you do that? I just did it now after I fixed a bug, so that neither me nor anyone else has the problem in the future. Debian has a program called „reportbug“ which you invoke with the package or file name related to the bug, even if you do not have a solution.

I think a distribution like Debian should appeal to you for its focus on quality. New packages in Debian move first to the Unstable distribution and then after some time to the Testing distribution. Testing is “freezed” before a Stable release to weed out remaining bugs. [1]

Debian also has a tool called “apt-listbug” that warns you before installing a new version of a package that has a known bug and gives you an option to not update that package automatically for as long as that bug exists.

What Ubuntu does is just putting its own stuff on top of Debian Unstable (or Testing, when it does a Long Term Support release). They have next to no quality control. When I drew glyphs for Unifont, this meant that for half a year, Ubuntu had a half-finished Unifont it imported from Debian Testing at the wrong time. I got complaints as I told people to install Unifont to play my Unicode proof-of-concept roguelike [2].

The guy from the article I wrote eventually did use Debian. I think he fiddled around with Emacs for over a month until he arrived at his “perfect” setup (which is different for everyone, by the way).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian

[2] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/notes/zoo-tycoon-roguel...

I know they are example questions, and I get your point, but:

> How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac?

A lot of people don't really have a strong preference for these things.

> How do you update all the software to the newest version?

    brew upgrade

> some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point

You can brew install the good ones with a oneliner: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replac...

But my overall point: I'm like your parent. I used to be a linux user, but I switched to a macbook 12 a little longer than a year ago and the pros far outweight the cons. And a lot of developers feel this way. You also get longer battery. And you can always spin up a vm for linux requirements.

I have tried a lot to use only linux. I was able to drop Windows completely (as I don't play videogames). But at least for the moment, macos is just much better for a lot of people.

Homebrew is a killer app for MacOS right now. I could switch back to Linux on the desktop (and spent quite a bit time investigating the possibility), but it could actually be harder to keep my Open Source tools up to date. Linuxbrew exists, but Homebrew is a proven and well-supported system.

The other key third-party app for me, oddly, turned out to be the Microsoft RDP client. I'm paid to manage servers, and unfortunately, some of those are Windows, so I need a totally reliable RDP client.

I also don't care about GUI theming, but I do care about readability, and MacOS on a machine with a Retina display delivers totally crisp font rendering. Linux is now constantly getting better, but I don't think that it could match MacOS yet, even on a machine with an equivalent display.

> How do you update all the software to the newest version?

Same way you do on Linux: MANUALLY. Unless you're running a rolling distribution like arch, most of the software you run is out of date. Sometimes you can find a PPA with the most recent stuff, but if you can't, you're compiling manually.

On linux, that comprises all software I run on the machine, command line and graphical. On OS X, it only affects stuff run through homebrew, which is a small fraction of apps that have no native OS X implementation. Not exactly a compelling argument to switch.

I wouldn't say the software update thing is any better on Linux than it is on OSX (I do love just typing "apt-get install vim"). In Linux I end up installing /a lot/ of things outside of apt/yum just like I install a lot of apps outside of Apple's App Store. There's actually a lot of pros/cons to each platform.

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