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Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

So, Homebrew?

You can't tell me that Microsoft is able to ship entire distribution's userlands (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, and more) through the Windows Store, including all their GPL3 components, and Apple can't figure out how to ship an updated version of base64.

If I'm grumbling, it's just because making devops/CI scripts work on Windows and Linux is easier than MacOS and Linux these days because my colleagues run into issues like "base64" or "uuidgen" having different arguments in the extremely dated MacOS userland, and they then have to brew install a bunch of isolated components.

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That is nothing compared to writing portable UNIX scripts during the UNIX wars.

Having to deal with three variants is relatively simple.

Now having to deal with DG/UX, Aix, Tru64, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and the new incumbent Linux, that was fun.

Yup, and then down in the code, it was #ifdef's up to your eyeballs[1], even if you went all the way and used autoconf/configure and then... more #ifdefs.

And we can tell our kids we had this thing called endianness which showed up in structure packing, system calls, network byte ordering, and hopefully portable binary file formats. Thankfully we had RPC and IDL to save us from that mess... not.

Oh and don't forget the windowing system war on top of the Unix war, all with different desktop and library concepts: CDE, Motif, Openwin, NeWS, DM, X11 and X10 at least.

One compatibility honorable mention goes to Apollo for at least making an attempt at flavor normalization: you could have an env var that would resolve a symlink at every file access near the top of the filesystem, where there would be a collection of different BSD/SystemV/Aegis(?) all running at once. [2]

1. https://maultech.com/chrislott/resources/cstyle/ifdefs.pdf

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS

Funny you should mention RPC because of course RPC was all the rage back in 1993, with the heap of garbage they called DCE/RPC.

To this date, this is the only network protocol I have ever seen that not only allowed you to choose the endianness you will use in the header, but also the floating point format.

The joys of CORBA and COM!

> Now having to deal with DG/UX, Aix, Tru64, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and the new incumbent Linux, that was fun.

Don't forget AIX/ESA (a weird beast), NextSTEP (which is still with us, in disguise), the HPC crowd (UNICOS, OSF/1 AD...), SINIX (my first contact with the internet, thanks to Siemens/Nixdorf)...

I've moved on to Windows since last year. Besides terminal emulators being shit (which they're fixing now), worse PDF support and shit OS config management, there's really not much anymore that goes in favor of Macs. Their laptops are worthless junk at 40% markup, the OS gets buggier and more locked down with every version while Windows is on a clear trajectory of improvement and PC hardware gives real choice and innovative solutions. I was a Mac user for 13 years, but no more. Since they gave all the keys to Jony it went down the drain real fast.

Those seem like pretty big downsides to me, and I don't believe the new terminal marketing gimmick. I will admit Windows has been very attractive lately for gaming reasons, but from a development standpoint, MacOS still seems way ahead of Windows. I seriously considered it, but there would be too much I'd miss if I switched. There's some minor reasons too, like why does IntelliJ look ugly in Windows? It looks great in both Mac and Linux.

"from a development standpoint, MacOS still seems way ahead of Windows"

Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?

Everyone has heard of Visual Studio, and nobody that has to use it wants to. Just because you have Stockholm syndrome doesn't mean everyone else has to have it too ;-)

Must be a different development sphere to me. I have to use xcode for dev on the Mac and it is feeble compared to VS. I can't think of a better IDE to be honest (C++, C# for me).

Whenever I have to use other offerings like Eclipse, Netbeans or Android Studio for other languages I am never very satisfied with them. Android Studio in particular breaks gradle and projects between updates, although Flutter seems to work.

VS is pretty nice if you run it without plugins that slow it down (like ReSharper)

I'm really suprised at this comment.

I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio.

In my opinion, Visual Studio massively outclasses Eclipse, VSCode and Netbeans. It even makes IntelliJ (which is pretty great too) look a bit inadequate.

(I use Emacs these days though.)

>from a development standpoint

>I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio

.NET is not the only ecosystem people develop for. There are embedded C/Forth, web frontend/backend, written in Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, other stuff. VS sucks for nearly everything safe C#/C++ for windows.

Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.

> Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.

Those that have CPU cycles and memory to spare do.

ReSharper is a meme in the .NET world, similar to how Crysis in the gaming world is: https://i.imgur.com/LQkRlSN.png

I have a laptop with 64GB of memory just because I need to run VS + ReSharper in a VM. Seriously.

It's why I put in: unless you have to use it, which means: if you target Windows. If you target anything else, you're probably not using it unless you already happen to have it. I agree that most IDEs are crap, it's pretty strange when you think about it, software developers developing software to develop software, but developing it badly so it now sucks for everyone.

It has been a long time since I used Visual Studio but I remember it as the best IDE I have ever used for C++.

I am now working on Linux with Sublime Text, Makefiles and the command line. I am most comfortable with that setup but there are many features that I miss from VS: the debugger, online help, code navigation, ...

Not that these features don't exist in other editors and IDEs, but with VS, they worked reliably and out of the box.

Note: VSCode is completely different. It is a multi-platform text editor, one of the best in town. A bit lacking in the performance department though, that's why I am still using Sublime Text.

>Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?

A sluggish clumsy bloated IDE? What's good about it? I've used it for a couple of years when I wrote directshow filters, and it was a complete shit back in a days (2015-2017).

* terrible clumsy project system, where changing a flag is a quest. As abominable as autotools.

* using non-vcproj projects is a pain, especially when you have a bunch of make files

* It's slow as hell.

* Language support is lacking. No OCaml, no Lisp, hell, even C11 is a quest.

After they've added a package manager and clang support, it became less painful, but fur from great experience.

Well did you try out Linux bash on windows. In less than 2 minutes you setup a Debian instance. You got shells and everything. All well known ide's are available on both Windows and Mac. In my opinion there is no real difference anymore. I am a Mac user and windows user. The only reason why I still use my Mac is because of the ergonomics.

In my experience Mac OS still has the edge in terms of stability. But certainly the gap is closing.

The only crashes I've had from NT kernel over the past 15 years or so are from graphics card drivers and bad RAM.

Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX. Suspend and resume in presence and absence of multiple monitors is like rolling dice; locks up about 15% of the time.

Lucky you! I do a reboot on my Windows 10 machine every night. I also suffered from intermittent complete and total lockups due to a bug in what I traced to spotify. Similar thing happened with MacOS and safari recently enough too so I stopped using Safari for a while ...

using a Lenovo P50 with windows 10 for 2 years now, I only reboot it maybe once a month, for the rest, I close the lid, it goes to sleep, next day in the office, I open the lid and continue where I stopped. so far I have had zero issues with it.

That's how I use my mac. Sad to say I've never had that experience with Windows but then again, I've never had a Lenovo ...

What kind of machine do you have?

Why do you ask?

To take your anecdote in context.

You think I’m making it up or something?

Not my experience. I used mostly Linux for 15 years, and I had zero problems with laptops, external screens and suspend in the past 8 years. I have a Linux laptop that's used for demo hooked up to a TV, settings are changed from dual screen to mirroring all the time, then it goes to sleep, is woken up with the TV off, etc, zero trouble, it hadn't rebooted in 2 months.

And Windows still requires random reboots for updates, of course usually at the worst possible time (fortunately I only use windows in VMs for testing). God how I hate Windows, it's unbearable really, after 5 minutes at the third nagging stupid popup (update Java! update Acrobat! update antivirus! don't turn off the computer, installing update 2 on 10532!) I want to throw the thing out of the window :)

I've been using Linux since 1996; not wet behind the ears. Graphics drivers are substantially worse on Linux than Windows, and even on Windows they're still the main source of problems.

A mix of dock and undock with multiple monitors is dodgy; like rolling a die. Plugging in the display port cable after a resume from a prior docked suspend, for a presentation, is flipping a coin.

A lot of what you say describes a fairly common experience with Windows too. Perhaps not with a Thinkpad maybe but I’ve failed to revive a sleeping windows machine on a few occasions, and switching between output sources can be unpredictable too. Mac is the only platform which consistenly succeeds at these kinds of things because of the vertically integrates hardware. Its the drivers as you say ... I don’t think the actual o/s has much say in it beyond the drivers that are supported.

> Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX.

Can't remember any major problems with Linux on laptops for latest 5 years. All works like charm.

If you use a cheap/noname/non-popular hardware - it happens, yes, but in Windows world too.

Lenovo Thinkpad.

It's the multi-monitor / dock interaction. It's just not solid.

Which dock do you have?

I've had issues with USB-C docks. I've had zero issues over four different Thinkpads (FC28 and FC29) with the Lenovo Thunderbolt dock.

Genuinely curious - which ergonomics do you mean? Macbooks have objectively terrible keyboards these days, and the lack of dedicated buttons on the trackpad makes two handed trackpad use a royal pain. Yes, the mouse movement is precise, but the trackpad doesn't blow my mind.

Old thinkpads with 7-row keyboards had proper ergonomics, to my mind anyway.

Re: IntelliJ looking bad on Windows, I do know that JetBrains IDEs are still stuck on using GDI for drawing fonts rather than the new DirectWrite protocol. The poor quality of GDI (especially on high DPI displays) is very noticeable when you switch from Linux or macOS to a Windows app that uses it. I looked it up a while ago, and as I recall it was an issue with the Java runtime that JetBrains IDEs use.

My biggest problem with Windows is that you can't scroll in a window or a pane without clicking on it first. Both Mac and Linux support that and it makes the OS feel so clunky.

That's actually one of the better new features in Windows 10 (that you can these days scroll an inactive window).

Oh, really? I might give it a try again one of these days, then.

I'm no Windows fan, but Windows 10 is the first where I don't actively hate the window manager. Well, I do hate how it keeps moving all my windows to the left side of the desktop. Not sure why that is happening. So I guess I hate something different about it now.

You mean it's snapping to the left half after some action? That would probably be when you press Windows+Left-Arrow, happens to me sometimes when I try to do Ctrl-left for example.

It's generally when I unlock the screen after waking up. I have no idea if I accidentally pressed Windows+Left, but it's doing this very consistently.

sounds a bit like a driver issue, like it changes the screen resolution during wake-up. you should figure out whether it's the exact size used for half-pane snapping (which sounds like userland issue), or whether it's some other size.

I don't think it's the size for 'half-pane snapping'. It seems a faulty screen resolution change on wake-up might indeed be my problem.

Yeah, Windows can actually do that now.

But in MacOS, typing doesn't follow the mouse by default. So you're scrolling away in a window you don't realize is inactive. Then go to close a tab or type and you've just closed a tab in a random application two monitors away. And it can be hit-or-miss whether you realize which application you just interacted with (or where you just inserted characters into your code).

Ugh this happens to me all the time, but on the other hand I'll sometimes be scrolling through a pdf with my trackpad, but typing in a pane on the left, so I do find it quite useful to have that split between kb/pointer focus.

Also: there was an app, sorry, a program we used with Windows98 that did this, Focus something or other it was called.

Out of curiosity, has Windows improved in any way from a low maintenance perspective?

The reason I switched to Mac in 2006 was that I ended up using a friend's Mac for a month while abroad so I could get some work done. When I got back to a place where I could get a new Viao at a reasonable price it occurred to me that I hadn't been fighting with the Mac a single time. Wifi always worked, everything I plugged into it just worked as well, the software I ended up installing just worked too, Apache and SVN ran fine, there was a good Terminal app out of the box, etc. This was in stark contrast with the decades long experience I had had with PCs until then. On any given week I had been invariably spending between a half-hour and a day fighting with Windows in some way or another. Which could mean trying to figure out why Wifi or some random printer didn't work, looking for drivers, reinstalling or reconfiguring some piece of software, and so forth. Has this improved materially since the past decade?

It certainly has improved, but Mac still has the edge in that regard. This mainly comes down to one things: Superior config management (plist files vs Windows registry). This makes it much easier to maintain - you hardly ever have to reinstall a Mac, instead just clean up all the Library folders and you're fine. A Mac HD also boots on any supported Mac hardware, impossible with windows, which makes things like Migration assistant and full Time machine restore possible.

Bundled apps to me are a wash. Preview >> Edge for PDFs and Terminal.app >> Cmd.exe, but explorer.exe >> Finder and Task Manager >> Activity Monitor.

Another big plus for windows is everything to do with graphics drivers and GPU support if you're into this. I also find WSL overall now better than Mac's Darwin since you get up to date Linux packages which beats homebrew in my books. Performance of WSL is also pretty good, much better than running a VM. This is really what turned Windows around for me, making it a very viable alternative.

how about screen management ? I'm using several virtual screens (spaces) in my mac, that makes things a lot easier to me. How does that go in today's windows?

That’s probably more a BSD vs GNU issue, to be fair. Mac is based on FreeBSD. GNU/Linux, well... :)

To be exact, FreeBSD and macOS (based on NeXTStep) are both based on BSD, and contribute to each other. FreeBSD came out after NeXTStep was released though...

True that freebsd is more recent than NeXT, but they re-imported a lot of stuff from more recent freebsd over the years though.

Look at a bunch of Apple manpages. Many of them say FreeBSD.

Bash is GNU and so is much of the dated MacOS userland.

If I recall correctly, much of the MacOS userland is dated because it uses the last GPLv2 releases of various packages before a move to GPLv3.

That's what this thread is about :)

How's using homebrew any of this different than being able to run "base64" and "uuidgen" on Windows? It's not like either of those applications are part of a Windows installation anyway.

That's my point. Why can't Apple ship an updated userland built in, through the Store, or as a download triggered by a command line (like XCode is).

Because GPL v3 says you have to run modified binaries and that means Apple has to give its private keys.

No? You just resign the binary with your key.

I'm sorry, this is totally off-topic but I had to re-read your comment 5 times until it became apparent that you meant re-sign, not surrender. English is funny sometimes (especially when you're not a native speaker like me:) ).

It's a good point; I'll keep it in mind when using the word in the future :)

You can't if the binary is a SIP-protected binary, and you can't use all signing features unless you disable SIP (for certain entitlements AFAIK)

Why do they have to run modified binaries?

Because that's one of the rights users of GPLv3 software have.

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