Comment by atl4s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atl4s | Hacker News Reader

More FOTM moaning about the state of Apple.

I can't believe people keep reading these "I left Apple and here's why you should care" articles by front end devs with no real idea of what goes into OS dev and where macOS has come from since the days of OS8.

Give me a break, surely if you want to use Windows you don't need to write 2000 words in the form of some needlessly pronoun heavy (because your opinion is really important) diatribe telling us all about how detatched Apple is from reality and how suddenly Windows is the 'place to be' because suddeny Windows has bash support, tell me again why I should drop a fully featured, mature *nix shell for one bolted on top of Windows.

Do people get paid to write articles specifically like this or are these devs so full of their own self importance that they feel like it's their duty to inform us of their opinions on the state macOS and why it's suddenly so much worse than ever before when in reality, macOS has never been more stable or developer friendly.

It's honestly so predictable I could have guessed 90% of the content of this article just from the sensationalist headline alone.

Welcome to the Internet, where people express their opinions on matters that are often trivial in the grand scheme of things. I trust you are equally annoyed at posts praising Macs?

macOS has never been more stable or developer friendly

The OS is fine, although largely in maintenance mode. The hardware value is poor and has gotten significantly worse in the last few years. I'm typing this on a retina iMac that I'm very happy with, but if I had to replace it there's no Mac that I would consider now that Windows has decent high-DPI support.

> now that Windows has decent high-DPI support

YMMV, but this is why I still use a Mac--because even Windows 10's high-DPI support is messy and not great. Applications act inconsistently and Windows is straight-up bad at handling different DPI on different devices (and when you've got two 27" 2560x1440 panels and the laptop's own panel, this is a pretty significant problem).

You're lucky with only 2560x1440, try a 5k screen on Windows 10, most (all?) modern apps work fine with Win 10 DPI scaling, but allot of the older, or less supported things like headphone software (looking at you Logitech) have 0 DPI support and are TINY or are scaled up, but pixelated (Looking at you Steam! Steam has updates like every 2nd day, but have yet to update the UI for proper DPI scaling)

Logitech headphone software on 5k screen vs Chrome -> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4joq2oW_zHBLXJLa2d1MEhlbTJ...

Sorry, rant over, had to get it out.

But I do use both Mac and Windows regularly and they both have their quirks, but personally I find Mac to be more polished, but Windows is catching up and Apple has been slacking recently.

Right - I meant that the big monitors are standard DPI, the laptop isn't.

On OS X, I've literally never thought about DPI.

I have a 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor connected to my Win10 desktop I'm typing this from. The DPI scaling works pretty damn well, apps switch DPI settings the instant they pass the boundary between the monitors. Sure, sometimes it breaks when games etc change the resolution on the 4k monitor, causing a window to be unscaled on the 4k monitor, but that's fixed simply by moving the window to the 1080p screen and back.

What trouble did you have? It's pretty great for me.

Controls jumping around when they windows between displays. Windows spawning on the laptop and not rescaling when brought to the low-DPI displays. It's just a stack of problems.

> macOS has never been more stable or developer friendly

* I have to turn off gatekeeper to run unsigned apps.

* I can't write into /bin or /usr on my own machine without flipping some magic option

* I can't run gdb without some complicated signing dance I have to do every time I update it.

* I can't run dtrace without rebooting and switching some secret flag off. I have to tell other people to turn they same thing off so they can dtrace applications.

That's just straight off the top of my head. The dtrace and gdb things are particularly annoying, as it makes life harder for me to get other users to do simple debugging tasks, and there is no simple workaround, just complicated instructions.

> I have to turn off gatekeeper to run unsigned apps.

Right-click on the unsigned app and select "Open". You only need to do this the first time you run the app.

If you're a developer or tester, this means every single time. Because every start is the first time for that build...

Regarding the gdb signing, it's painful. Even more so is the privilege escalation--it's impossible to debug over ssh with gdb or lldb since the GUI prompt is on a different machine. Not having the prompt in the terminal where the debugger is being run is asinine. I had to switch to debugging on FreeBSD to avoid the pain of all this; it's madness.

I agree this is annoying, but regarding gdb: lldb works fine, and it's not Apple's fault that gdb hasn't automated the complicated signing dance. In my experience, gdb is broken on macOS in several other ways too...

The days of OS8 were over 20 years ago.

even OSX 10.3, which was when OS X started to get really good, was released in late 2003, almost 14 YEARS AGO .

I know people who have been on Macs for 20 years, since OS8 or 9 days, who have bought non-Mac hardware and won't get another MacBook - that is significant and Apple should be paying attention to that.

Apple is not gated by their software costs - they clearly make a lot of money from their desktop, mini, and laptop sales.

So why not produce something truly excellent instead of merely adequate?

    > where macOS has come from since the days of OS8.

Downhill in many ways that I care about. Someone else posted elsewhere in this thread that they can no longer drag a photo directly from Photos app to Pixelmator. That would be unimaginable in the old days.

I care a lot about a consistent Finder UI, about the Clipboard and Dragboard. Those became a little less logical when OS X 10 was introduced. As you know, many other features became much more powerful, so overall it was easily forgivable.

Unfortunately, since Tim has been in charge, the lack of logic and consistency has become a real problem. Nobody at Apple seems to care about their own "Human Interface Guidelines" anymore.

It's like Apple compares Mac with iOS, and decides that mystery meat navigation, and inconsistent UI, are no big deal. As long as it's no worse on the Mac than on iOS, Apple is fine with things.

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