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Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

It's not that installing Linux is a hassle. I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac. OmniFocus, 1Password and DevonThink are two I have running now. I've also got OmniGraffle, Affinity Photo/Designer, Pixelmator and Keynote at least that I use fairly regularly (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some). I do a fair bit that is cross-platform and would work fine on Linux, but there are a lot of Mac-specific apps that are really well designed and a joy to use and I would miss them.

(And, yes, there are open source replacements for all of these that run on Linux. I know, but the UX is not the same!)

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> It's not that installing Linux is a hassle. I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac.

I think that's a huge X factor a lot of the latest discussions are missing. People LOVE MacOS apps. They're beautiful. They work well. They're typically fast. They're user friendly. Windows and Linux apps are none of those things. In my experience, Mac users don't mind paying for Mac apps because they tend to be of high quality. Windows and Linux users won't pay for apps unless they absolutely have to because the quality of the available apps varies so much.

"X factor". 11/10 would pun again.

And here I thought my jokes were wasted on hacker news. :)

> People LOVE MacOS apps

While true, a lot of us can live with less beautiful machines and software especially if the prettier machine makes us break our workflow (ie how to vim without an esc button)

Even if you have an escape key, you shouldn't really be using the physical Escape key for Esc, it's against the philosophy of Vim.

1password was a weird one for me, I operate on BSD/Linux and very seldomly my Mac (I use an iPhone though) and I wanted to stick with 1password because it allowed me to access my passwords from my phone.

Luckily they use an open specification for the database they use which has a python module[0] and I've started building my own interfaces[1] to interact with the keychain in much cooler ways.

It's no 1password.app though. :(

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/blimey/0.9.4

[1] https://git.drk.sc/dijit/password-utils

The lack of a native 1Password client is one of the last major pain points I live with day to day in Linux.

Those Python utilities actually look really useful but as far as I can tell, they only interface with the older .agilekeychain version of the 1Password vault. I've been looking for something similar that understands the newer .opvault format but am yet to find anything that just works.

The Windows 1Password client actually works fine under Wine, including its browser integration. But the Windows version is't nearly as nice as the Mac one, and you get the usual Wine sorts of issues.

Biggest one is that the password prompt will pop up and have a blinking text cursor even though it's not actually the active window, just the active window within the Windows layer. Whoops, hope you didn't type your master password anywhere leaky.

> I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac

This is pretty much the reason I haven't switched to linux; it's not that OSX/macOS is particularly incredible, but that 1Password, Alfred and some other apps don't work on linux.

Funny that you mention Alfred and I forgot to. It's so built in to how I do things on my Mac that I forgot all about it!

I also use Dash regularly while I work, often in conjunction with Alfred.

I agree. I've tried using webapps instead (evernote, slack, 1Password) but there are often features missing and the experience is not the same as running the Mac app.

Design tools on Linux are still not good enough. It would be awesome if Affinity released their software for Linux since Adobe is not going to.

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