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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

You hinted at it in the end: MacBooks have good software that works. No troubles connecting to peripherals like printers and projectors. No worries about laptop sucking battery when I close the lid and forget to sleep.

And MacBooks have the best touchpad of all laptops.

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> MacBooks have good software that works.

More specifically, the stuff I don't want to mess with just works: peripherals and GUI stuff work without intervention, and the thing goes to sleep when I close the lid. And the stuff I want to mess with is still good old familiar Unix. I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile, but the Free Software model only seems to work for things coders like to work on in their spare time, like terminals, text editors, and command-line programs. For the rest, I'm willing to pay my fellow coders so I don't have to deal with it.

> I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile

I read your first sentence and was like "wow, this guy hasn't used Linux in a while." Then I got to your second sentence.

So, yeah, maybe give it another go. In my experience most of the complaints I had 4-5 years ago are gone at this point, and the convenience gap has closed substantially. OS X is still more user friendly of course, and there's a little bit of configuration required to make everything work smoothly under Linux, but it's a lot better than you remember.

Importantly, I've seen some devs using OS X, and they spend way more time dealing with dev tooling issues than I spend dealing with printers, devices, and gui stuff.

IMO Windows is better than OSX, but to each of its own.

For example I hate Finder, I dont like that I am not able to run lots of software, I dont like that its running an ancient version of OpenGL/there is no Vulkan.

I'm of the opposite opinion. I like finder since I can do a search and have instant results, rather than the hour wait that Windows Explorer provides. I also like how file indexing is built into macOS by default, rather than having it available only via a nebulous add-on.

I agree when I switched from Windows to osx, I had a lot of trouble with finder. But now I am slowly getting used to it.

Also, as a mac user for the past year and a half, I still can't figure out when the three coloured dots are useful. Just give me windows-style minimize/maximize/close buttons please...

Every long time Mac user I've asked says they just don't use those buttons. Maximising windows is a mess in mac. Multi monitor support is also rather poor.

Over all, I've had no real problems with OS X (at least after installing my own terminal program and own version of bash and such) and everything worked smoothly, which is great, but I certainly wouldn't hold OS X up as some example of perfect design because there are lots of things windows and Linux do better.

> MacBooks have good software that works

I just spent my entire workday struggling to figure out why `kernal_task` was constantly using 16gb of RAM. Whenever people say macOS "just works" I assume they do nothing but web browse. It's great at that.

Your OS manages all of your memory. You can't get any memory at all without asking it for it. How much memory were you requesting, and why didn't you get it? Is that the problem you were solving? Is there some reason you suspect the OS preferentially gives memory to web browsers?

Did you figure it out? If not, you may want to try choosing "All processes, hierarchically" from the View menu in Activity Monitor.

I "solved" the problem by restoring a week old backup from before I'd upgraded to Sierra. All other things were equal, so the OS was the culprit. This is why good backups are important, never know when Apple's gonna screw you.

The browser takes up most of takes up most of my resources. Apart from that it would be Adobe products and sometimes MATLAB (all less resources than safari). My terminal would be negligible.

I agree with your comment. Generally, OSX often means I am using more resources to do the same task than when I use my archlinux. But in the era of 16g+ ram and terabyte Harddisks, I find it simpler to just let OSX use extra resources so I can spend less time thinking about low level processes.

Man I feel like I'm attacking apple a lot recently but this is something else I saw on my MBA - various daemons (powerd, kernel_task, accountsd, and more I can't remember) spinning on 100% cpu usage leaving the laptop unusable.

The only software I miss is "Preview" on Mac OS. It's amazing for editing pdfs - merge, split etc.

Preview.app is one of the few things I miss when working on Windows or Linux systems, we just had to buy a Foxit PhantomPDF license to do basic PDF editing like this and I was thinking "why the hell is this not just a standard feature like it is on macOS?".

>Preview.app is one of the few things I miss when working on Windows or Linux systems, we just had to buy a Foxit PhantomPDF license to do basic PDF editing like this and I was thinking "why the hell is this not just a standard feature like it is on macOS?"

For that we have to go back about a decade:

http://betanews.com/2006/06/02/adobe-to-sue-microsoft-for-pd...

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/microsoft-strips-key-...

The long and short of it is that Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft for including PDF support as a feature in Office (despite allowing it on OS X and OpenOffice at the same time) so MS stopped doing anything PDF related. Adobe was widely derided in the software industry over the incident.

So we all can thank Adobe for that.

Bollocks. I have plenty of Mac uses at work asking me for help setting up their Macs with peripherals.

> No troubles connecting to peripherals like printers and projectors.

Well, except for all those dongles you need to drag around with you.

I've had problems connecting by MBP to the projector system in a company that uses predominantly macs... (but not using Apple TV - that's always worked flawlessly for me). So I definitely disagree with the no trouble connecting to peripherals like projectors.

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