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Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

Nice resource.

But what I miss most, is a deeper analysis of the different launchd services and agents. - Especially which ones can be disabled and what features will be impacted.

It is quite opaque, especially considering the verbose descriptions of Windows Services out of the box.

I want to disable all these, for me, useless features: handoff, geo, maps, icloud, push, commCenter, spotlight web, siri, social integration, diagnostics reporting, and many more.

It has been a very annoying experience of seemingly unrelated parts of the OS breaking when Disabling anything, - and log spamming of unsuccessful attempts of using it.

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The parts of the OS you are describing were not designed in a modular way. It seems to me like you are using the wrong operating system if you want this level of control.

Ah, I'm holding it wrong. :P I use FreeBSD, Linux and Windows. I like macOS, I want to use it, but not under a facist rule of the one holy way.

It is a tool and should not push policy through arbitrary limitations. But it seems we are caught in a war of lock-in ecosystem providers. Kind of a more realistic version of the much used picture of corporation-states or societies in sci-fi.

Apart from this, hypothetically I might not only an end-user but also an admin who has to implement certain policies. The argument is never sound, there is always an economic or practical tradeoff and you are stuck somewhere and have to make it work and yours.

What part of macOS do you like and want to use?

The UI is polished, Commercial and refined Apps are available and technological it is a reasonably sound design.

I have my *nix shell with software from macports as well.

I just don't have the motivation or time anymore to make linux fit my personal computer needs, it always ends up in rabbit holes of tangles to accomplish many things and when you are actually trying to accomplish something unrelated to playing with it.

Do you think the two might be related? One is modular and configurable and ends up in rabbit holes of tangles and the other is monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time?

Sure they are related. But its not black and white, and not an absolute correlation.

macOS itself is actually designed in a very modular way if you look at the message based integration of components via XPC and "do one thing" daemons.

I have accepted that I must forfeit some personal preferences in the Apple ecosystem, but I choose to draw the line with not being able to disable intrusive and privacy related features/components.

A similar complaint can be made about Windows, which is more monolithic in its design in my view, but it offers (as mentioned in my top-level comment) proper descriptions and a UI to disable services. Also there are many tools like Win10Privacy and such available which disable a lot, without making the system to constantly misbehave.

"trains on time" - While I appreciate the metaphor, when considered carefully, it is more likely linux and the pragmatic approach that makes the "trains run on time" in many fields. (embedded and server-side)

It's designed to be modular for ease of development by Apple folks. Whether they extend the benefits of that modularity to you, the user, is entirely case-by-case -- and the default answer is 'no'.

"Trains on time" was a reference to your original comment (yes, I know it's not really true)

While a government that's "monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time" is clearly a bad thing, it's not clear that the same holds for computers -- particularly for your average user. I'm not too concerned about Apple locking down my machine as long as I can get what I want to get done done -- and that doesn't involve making my tool conform to some ideology. I have more important things to worry about -- even more important infringements on personal freedom -- and I'd rather have my tool work adequately with as little pain as possible.

that doesn't involve making my tool conform to some ideology

The only platform that does this is iOS, which embeds an ideology that forces developers to lock down their apps even against their own wishes, and hence prevents the use of GPLv3 licensed code.

Meanwhile, the major Linux distros include all types of licenses, including proprietary.

Windows is not better than mac un that sense

That is certainly true of the more recent versions, but at least there has historically been a far bigger wealth of information about tweaking and modifying Windows than any version of MacOS, no doubt discovered through experimentation and reverse-engineering. On the other hand, Apple and its user's philosophy has always leaned towards the "don't look, don't touch, just use it as we made it" direction.

Linux and the BSDs are traditionally far in the other direction: extreme flexibility and customisability, but you really do have to configure things before you can start working. Windows is somewhere in the middle but (IMHO unfortunately) moving towards the Mac side.

> The parts of the OS you are describing were not designed in a modular way

On what basis are you saying that?

I really want a wiki for OSX processes & apple urls, integrated with little snitch & other app/network analyzers too.

That way we can find out what is gamed, or passd, or what the hell is pancake.apple.com for.

They should all have man pages already. (That's Game Center and Passbook/Wallet though.)

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