Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

The hardware has nothing to do with those software libraries if that's what you are getting at. And when using Windows or Linux, all three are available. On macOS, you currently only have OpenGL and Metal, and OpenGL is deprecated.

This does however not mean that you can't use the other API's, it just means that when you are using macOS, you'll have to bring the API's with you, and that is totally possible.

In most cases, you're not using those libraries directly and using an engine instead, and most popular engines have support for the bigger API's, including Mantle, Metal, DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan etc. You simply select the build profile of choice (or make a build that has it all) and build it to taste.

View on HN

Please, don’t spread misinformation. macOS has not supported latest OpenGL for quite some years. Linux is not supported either, by the way.

On top of that, if I buy a “Pro” machine, I want everything available and as much choices as possible; and I want them on OS X, not on Windows.

As for Metal, it is just Apple leveraging iOS marketshare. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a nice API, but one that nobody asked for.

Finally, speaking of engines, most productivity software does not use them, so your point is moot.

The reality is that the software aspect of the Mac ecosystem is a mess since Jobs died; and also the hardware is a mess for the last couple of years. Even XCode and related tools are nowadays not top-notch compared to Linux-based ones and modern Visual Studio.

By linux based ones, do you mean things like bazel? What tools are specifically linux based?

Most development software in general: debugging tools like Valgrind, niche compilers, servers, libraries not-so-well-tested on macOS, etc. In general, macOS is currently in a sad state of affairs; when it could have been the best development platform for most use cases. I actually had to switch to a Linux setup for my research because of this. Unbelievable if you’d asked me 5 years ago.

If we could get Adobe and a few other companies to port their software to Linux - even if it costs as much - then I think there would be a cascade effect that decreases the cost desktops & laptops, while increasing the quality. You wouldn't need much more than a great windows manager after a main proaudio & provideo app is ported. I highly doubt they would be that difficult to port. Maybe +2 engineers per program per year max. And that extra bread would be more than enough to cover their salaries! It feels like were further off from ideal workstations these days, but we're not really... It's just that Apple & Microsoft have been pushing various types of "power users" away from what they've been asking for all along. Finally let some group of us move to Linux comfortably. Linux has browsers, productivity & office, music & video players, communication, utilities, and even games to some degree - covered. But we need pro-audio & pro-video areas covered!

At this point, I think you should be rooting for the 'year of the android desktop' more than the 'year of the linux desktop' if you want low cost OSes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com