If I wanted to go back to seeing my operating system as a hobby then Linux would be mostly a better option.
For the more "power users" who prefer to customise things to a fine degree and make particular choices a typical user doesn't want/need, Apple products aren't always the right option.
Case in point - I recently had a user who did all kinds of audio editing for foley sound effects and had organized them all into folders himself. When he switched to the Mac, we were using software that has a very iTunes-focused mentality and it imported all the sounds into a library. He could not get over the fact that everything was flat and that he couldn't view his folder structure and was so frustrated because he couldn't find anything. It took me days to get the point across to him that a library system was much more powerful than a strict hierarchy because he could tag sounds with multiple keywords instead of just relying on his memory to remember which folder he had put a particular clip in. It's now been about 6 months and he has converted so many people to the Mac just by showing them how he can search tags for "flute", "wood", and "horror" and get a listing instead of having to remember that it was in his "horror" folder and then inside the "flute" folder with some weirdly numbered filename.
It's so nice when the computer just gets out of the way and lets you worry about the work and not about futzing with everything in the background.
Right, so he had his workflow organized in a particular way that worked for him, but rather than allow him to work like that his computer forced him into a workflow management paradigm and then you told him it was better that way and he should just accept it.
> It's so nice when the computer just gets out of the way and lets you worry about the work and not about futzing with everything in the background.
I agree, I wish they'd actually do that in 2018.
You can't opt out of strong opinionation when it comes to operating systems or applications in general, sadly.
Take Linux for example. You can customize a ton to get your workflow exactly right if you really know exactly what you're doing. If you don't, though (and I'd argue that most people don't), it's a nightmare. One wrong step can take down the entire workflow completely.
How and in what universe? I'm not merely being flip I literally don't understand how having options leads to such disasters. In most linux distros for example you have a central settings menu much like the windows control center plus many apps have a settings menu for app specific settings.
If you check a box and things no longer work the way you expect it doesn't require magic to open the menu and uncheck the box or reset the app to default settings. Its rather difficult to do any real harm. Even mucking up a system so bad it can't boot is cause for booting up from a disk to fix the problem or reinstalling in an hour if that seems too challenging.
I'm not clear on how to parse "take down an entire workflow completely" into anything meaningful. Its like someone argued for a house with a single set of furniture glued down to the floor and discussed how houses where you could put any sort of furniture down anywhere could take down your breakfast routine completely as if billions of people weren't out there organizing their own kitchens and churning out meals all over the world.
I for one love tagging search systems, but still need folder structures for organization. I feel itchy when all my shit is just slopped into a single folder, especially when I need to work in the terminal for something.
His big realization was that he didn't actually care about how the files were organized so long as he could find the sounds he was looking for. He cared before because there wasn't any way to efficiently search for them by any meaningful method (finding "metallic" sounding effects, for example) and so he filed things away in folders so that he would only have to browse through a subsection of folders (in that case - materials->metals->metallic). Now he just searches the library for "metallic" and all the sounds come up and he can combine search terms for "loud metallic" or "warped metallic" or "wobbly metallic" and get exactly the sounds he's looking for.
Except that it didn't, at all, he'd just become used to it. It still took him 3x-4x as long to use the structure that he had devised as opposed to the "new" one. On top of that, a good majority of the sounds that he was using were already tagged via ID3 tags with descriptors so he wasn't even using tools that were available to him the whole time. I didn't tell him that it was better that way and that he should just accept it, you're assuming that. What I actually did was ask him to just trust me and the designers at Apple for 2 weeks and try using the system as it was intended. If it didn't work for him, I would teach him how to use it the way he was used to using it (the option is always available and it's not like MacOS forces you to do it that way).
It took him 3 days to agree that the library method that MacOS used was far more efficient and better suited to what he had been doing the whole time. Additionally, it opened up even more avenues for him because he could extend those same paradigms to video and actual music files (as opposed to audio/sound effect files).
>I wish they'd actually do that in 2018
I work as a developer in digital media production and I love my Macs because they do actually do exactly that. I literally never have to mess with the OS and can focus exclusively on getting my work done. The only exception to that rule is the rare case where I have to use Adobe tools. Some of them are just unstable, regardless of if you're running them on a Mac or PC.
Also, to stop any further assumptions or insinuations, I'm also a PC gamer and have extensive background in web development so I'm extremely familiar with both Windows and Linux (mostly CentOS and Ubuntu). My Mac is the only machine that actually gets out of the way and lets me work.
window management:
Turn off all the window edge snapping. Put up with single pixel borders, windows not saving their monitor, size and position. Put up with the single tab at the top of the window eating up screen space. Put up with a few other minor annoyances due to bugs in Xfce.
make keybindings the same in all apps:
alias x='/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl'
Uninstall a lot of other crap I don't need or want. I should switch to another leaner distro (ie. no systemd), but it has taken a lot of effort to get to a system that works well for my needs despite all my preferences from using Mac OS X for so long. I don't think I could use a more recent version of what is now macos.
My new company is a Windows shop, and I'm actually finding it surprisingly pleasant—to the point that I'm seriously considering using Windows 10 full-time for personal use as well. I don't come to this decision lightly: I'd been anti-"M$" for a number of years, to the point of writing a paper in high school advocating for them to be broken up (back around year 2000).
Looking at the trajectory of recent OS releases from my experience:
- Linux: Still tends to lag behind a bit in hardware compatibility (as is expected), but quite pleasant to use—especially when staying on the stable/LTS releases.
- MacOS: Not sure if I can identify the last release that actually made my life easier.
- Windows: I see a fair amount of real innovation, and they seem committed to reducing paper cuts.
If you care about privacy and control, Win10 introduces many, many paper cuts.
And I do not consider spending a weekend (or longer) to get my sound chip working fun any more. I am too old for that stuff. Maybe I just have a lucky hand picking hardware, but except for the nVidia driver, hardware has just worked(tm) for me.
Don't get me wrong, if you are happy on macOS, by all means, enjoy it. But the old cliche that getting hardware to work on GNU/Linux is not true these days.
But I do agree, macOS without the tight integration between hardware and OS seems pointless.
That's only true if you make a point of buying hardware you already know there's linux drivers for. I work with a few headless linux boxes, but not a GUI. Every year or two I try a distribution or two on whatever hardware I have, hit a problem, sigh after reading through numberless blog/SO/reddit posts contradicting each other on what's possible, and abandon the attempt.
I have a 2018 Dell XPS 15. From what I've read, there's only an 'experimental' (ugh) driver for the fingerprint scanner. To switch between integrated/GPU graphics, you have to log in and out (or you don't - depending on who you read). Not sure about the touchscreen, but I can't summon the motivation to find out. So much depends on fiddling, experimenting, and reading. I'd rather go for a run, and put up with Windows (which I loathe, but loathing seems to be a precondition of computer use in 2018).
I had the same experience with my 2015 Dell XPS 13... a few annoying quirks for the first month (mainly trackpad) which the combined efforts of Dell and the community quickly solved. Since then it has been rock solid. I used it for 3.5 years and only upgraded to the new XPS15 to get more RAM.
> So much depends on fiddling, experimenting, and reading.
How about not stressing about it now? My approach this time round is to not spend my own time fiddling with it. I'm going to wait patiently for others to figure it all out and get their fixes into upstream distribution. As my main problem is with GPU switching, I've got plenty of non-GPU projects to do in the meantime...
P.S. If you do want gpu switching on the XPS15, check out this repo:
Well that's what I'm doing by using Windows. I don't like it, but it doesn't consume any of my time - even after not having used Windows for many years, I was productive on my new machine within an hour. Windows is a mess compared to OS X, but a fairly productive one for me.
I haven't had time to try a Linux install on this machine yet, but have set aside some SSD space for doing so at some point. I have to say though from past experience, I'm not optimistic that it will ever be more than an experiment.
The first few months with Linux were fun as I played around and discovered what I could and couldn't do to wreck an install. Zero hardware-related problems.
And then I put multi distros on this generic i-5 box. And left them alone. Zero cares for years. All hardware covered. Xubuntu 18.04 boots from my SSD in under 5 seconds.
I suppose you might have given up at just the time all those problems were going away.
Stick with one of the Ubuntu flavors, or Linux Mint, or MX17, and the likelihood, these days, is that there'll be few problems. Unless, of course, Linux won't run some needed software.
Also mac gui thing is bit more stable than linux windows managers but after a time it will manifest bugs that you will only be able to get rid of by fresh install of the whole system.
Also don't be surprised when you copy folder onto the folder of same name. If source folder has less files then target one, the files missing in source will get deleted from target. On Mac sometimes copy means delete.
Parent comment was simply saying that macOS on Apple hardware doesn't require maintenance, and if the poster was interested in an OS that did then Linux would be better than macOS on a Hackintosh.
They aren't particularly fragile anymore, it's been quite awhile since an update broke something major. Even the upgrade to High Sierra which switched to APFS went off without a hitch on my machine. The only thing I have to check on before upgrading is if nvidia's drivers are supported.
I built a hackintosh 2 years ago. It's been fantastic and required very little time to keep updated and running smoothly.
tonymacx86 is the go to place for checking on hardware compatibility for the most part. insanelymac tends to be more technical, it's where a lot of devs that make it all work hang out. You likely won't need insanelymac unless you are trying to get some poorly supported hardware working.
I should have noted in my previous comment but I purposely chose hardware for my build that I knew worked well. Things can get complicated if you are trying to make any random hardware work, although even that is much better than it used to be.