Hacker News Reader

Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

> In a hotel (=on Mac), everything is stylish and cared for, but you have very little freedom to change things.

I've heard this over and over — that Macs are locked-down, uncustomisable machines — and I don't agree with it at all.

I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are standard interfaces to per-application Preferences and keyboard shortcuts. When I sit down to use someone else's Mac, I have no idea how to use it!

What changes am I missing? The only thing I can think of is that I can't use a different window manager or a different kernel, but I'm fine with those already.

View on HN

Once upon a time this was true. User-facing documentation was scarce (usually requiring internet searches). However, between unofficial package managers like homebrew, the excellent efforts of a few devs (LaunchBar/Quicksilver, PathFinder, Little Snitch, etc...), `osascript`, and the internet providing defaults documentation for obscure apple apps, I always felt like I could get the system to behave the way I needed it to.

This started changing about a decade ago. The first time I noticed it was when Apple bundled all of the services involved in NAT into a huge binary (this would have been about OS X 10.8 or .9). You could turn it on or off, but there was no longer a built-in way to serve DHCP on both ports.

There's been a steady progress away from tools aimed at the entire skill gradient and towards the lower end of that gradient: Around 10.9 OSX got new file open/save dialogs, which were infinitely better if you used a mouse... but lacked any cmd-key shortcuts.

Gatekeeper has made it progressively harder for system tweaks like LaunchBar or Little Snitch to exist, and I've had to wrestle with SIP more than once.

In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev community in more recent iterations of the OS.

> but lacked any cmd-key shortcuts

Not true. The shortcut is cmd-shift-g which allows one to select files via the standard filesystem directory hierarchy, using a widget which supports tab completion.

What cmd-key shortcuts are you thinking of? FWIW every apple filepicker window I come across I can utilise the following shortcuts consistently, which is very nice:

Cmd-Shift-A: Open Applications folder

Cmd-Shift-H: Open Home folder

Cmd-Shift-D: Open Desktop folder

Cmd-Shift-O: Open Documents folder

Cmd-Option-L: Open Downloads folder

Cmd-Shift-L: Open Library folder

Cmd-Shift-.: Toggle Hidden Files

Cmd-[: Back

Cmd-]: Forward

Cmd-Up: Up

I forget the full list, but these had been standard since I started with OS7.

cmd-s Save

cmd-n New folder

cmd-shift-s Save As

It's possible some have been added back.

That's a useful list. If I may say so I think it omits the best one!

Cmd-Shift-G: Use the filesystem however the fuck you like, with tab completion.

That hidden files toggle shortcut is amazing! I've always used a terminal command I have saved in notes to do that.

So much easier!

Embarrassingly I am not new to OSX/MacOS.

This list of shortcuts is really useful. Thank you!

If anyone is interested, here's a full list that I got it from that blew my mind https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

It's useful to emphasize that the Cmd-[ and Cmd-] shortcuts specifically, work pretty much everywhere: in iTunes, Safari, Mail, Preferences, etc. It's almost like macOS has universal "scene-graph navigation shortcuts."

> In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev community in more recent iterations of the OS.

The GNU/Linux community also isn't bending to my will arbitrarily either. Frustrating, to say the least.

In all seriousness, people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry), and you find out this is pretty much impossible. In reality software is mostly customizable in the way the creators built it to be customized, including things like windowserver and macos mouse behavior and X11 and gtk and emacs and bash.

It seems like you're using OSes that are trying to cater to a diminishingly technical crowd. I read (somewhere, a year or so ago) that the generation now in their late 20s/early 30s was the last one that actually needed to care about how their computers worked, because their computers occasionally needed to be fixed. Generally speaking, I think that the newer generation has likely never been exposed to a computer that they could try to troubleshoot and fix themselves: everything is iPhone apps and Windows 7 / 10 and Andriod and slick websites. The information age no longer requires technical knowledge.

As a result, I'd guess that most of the purchasers of new computers are in the generations above and below the ones with technical knowlege: the new generation, without the background to even care about being a power user, and the older generation where most aren't power users anyway.

BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.

> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry)

> BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing.

Really?

How does one go about configuring i3 such that, say, any time you hit ctrl-w it deletes backwards to the previous white space (a common readline binding) in any text entry box in, say, Firefox, IntelliJ, Spotify, VLC, Amarok, Gimp, etc?

Are you quite certain that “readline bindings everywhere there’s a textbox” is really in the scope of i3’s customizations? What OP described goes quite a bit beyond window manager customization.

> It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.

On OS X this can be achieved by placing

    {
      "^w"        = "deleteWordBackward:";
    }

in $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict, so I rather think he already is using an OS that exposes this level of pervasive customization.

How does that work? If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.

> If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.

Of course it’s system textbox specific; if you reimplement your own, there is no magic involved.

And obviously it’s possible in GTK. And KDE, and one-offs like Firefox, for that matter. I’d suggest that the fact that you have to do it in about 20 different ways to cover your common apps, and a few will not even offer this kind of configuration, is net-worse than the OS which makes this so easy because there’s a standard GUI toolkit that nearly everything uses.

This doesn’t mean “Linux Bad, OS X Good”, but it is indicative of the fact that “Linux is configurable and OS X isn’t” is a very poor descriptor of reality.

Configurability is a complex topic with a lot of different facets, and both OSes offer different ranges of ease of configurability in different areas.

ColanR made the extraordinary claim that, ostensibly because he uses i3, “it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to <command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry>”. This is a very typical Linux user’s response in which they very narrowly equate mac keybindings with “window manager configuration”, when the flexibility offered by the system is in reality much broader than that.

Well, the point is all of this problem is there in osx too, since GTK, Qt, sdl2 and custom made windowing toolkit can all run in osx.

I know atleast a few programs that people use on osx which break these conventions, hence it's not as universal as your proclaim.

Unless you run only their store apps on your computer(which most likely no developer does), then maybe what you say makes sense. Otherwise it's not better than linux distros like elementary OS where convention is also to use gtk only apps(similar to cocoa only).

> Unless you run only their store apps on your computer(which most likely no developer does), then maybe what you say makes sense. Otherwise it's not better than linux distros like elementary OS where convention is also to use gtk only apps(similar to cocoa only).

This is, frankly, horseshit.

I run a lot of non-store apps, and absolutely none of them are GTK based, because GTK apps on OS X run through X Windows and look and work like dogshit. Next to nobody is voluntarily running that garbage.

Qt uses native text widgets, and works with the default input customization just fine. I can’t even begin to think of a development app that would be written in sdl2, a bloody games API.

Very, very few apps commonly in use by devs on OS X use anything other than native widgets, and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

The situation is a far, far, laughable cry from elementary OS, because outside of a small limited set of apps specifically targeted at such a niche distro, most Linux apps are still written in a hodgepodge of inconsistent wheel-reinventing mess of incompatible toolkits. The situation is night-and-day in inconsistency compared to OS X.

> I can’t even begin to think of a development app that would be written in sdl2, a bloody games API

A lot of games do, some even have their built-in editor and it's not about sdl2, it's anything custom widget toolkit. So your thing is a nice convention which often works but not always.

> laughable cry from elementary OS, because outside of a small limited set of apps specifically targeted at such a niche distro

Small limited set? a lot of programs are already written with gtk, distro merely enforce this convention in their app store like apple does.

I am not going to bother commenting on obvious things about how consistent OS X is.

The Cocoa text input widget supports these keybindings and is used in many applications. Linux does not have one single input widget that is as popular (Gnome apps use a GTK text widget, KDE apps use a Qt text widget, etc.) On Linux, you would need to address this setting on a per widget set basis.

I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget. We're lucky in this case that we like this function. In other cases (like virtual desktop management) Apple's decisions have been towards less customizability. I believe that has long been a Hallmark of Apple, back when OS X was released Apple scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever want to change the default theme (which at that time was a bit more extreme). A "gray" theme.was introduced after much pressure from customers.

That said, I seriously doubt that the Apple Computer of today is as interested in ensuring this functionality to the same degree as the Apple of ten years ago. They have made many developer unfriendly decisions in the past decade, I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.

> Linux does not have one single input widget that is as popular (Gnome apps use a GTK text widget, KDE apps use a Qt text widget, etc.). On Linux, you would need to address this setting on a per widget set basis.

Yes, I clearly already understood that. I was pointing out how absurd ColanR’s claim was that he could do this all through i3 config “super easy”. It isn’t within the domain of the window manager to control the toolkits’ widget bindings, which are all over the map in terms of customizability.

> I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget.

Which, in my opinion, strongly increases customizability because I can be sure the things I customize work the way I want them to effectively everywhere; I am not limited by every third application author’s obstinate choice to hardcode some other set of bindings in some deliberately incompatible toolkit.

I’d suggest that our disagreement comes down to the fact that configurability is not a linear gradient, but a fairly complex, multi-dimensional topic with a lot of subtle trade-offs that different people may have different preferences surrounding.

> I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.

Sure. Similarly I don’t count on however you do this in GTK today still working in 5 years, given how often they CADT their way into new incompatible configuration systems.

> Around 10.9 OSX got new file open/save dialogs, which were infinitely better if you used a mouse... but lacked any cmd-key shortcuts.

Cmd+Shift+G withing an open/save diolog gets you a dialog where you can enter a path with tab completion support.

There's no real package manager. You can't rebuild your kernel. You can't upgrade your hardware. Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.

“You can’t rebuild your kernel.” Are you kidding me? Apple supports the hardware it ships on day one, then provides free updates until the device is obsolete.

If you must rebuild Apple’s OSS kernel, you can follow the instructions here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

what means device is obsolete?

Do you mean i3 cannot handle general browsing tasks?

Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

It means "until the third-party developers in the OS's application ecosystem have changed their definition of 'state of the art' to include the use of enough new layers of bloat that old devices can no longer run the newest [versions of] apps."

An obsolete laptop is the same as an obsolete phone: it's one where it chugs when opening Spotify, or Slack, or any other "nobody ever bothered to optimize this" app that everyone uses anyway.

Or, to put that another way: you can certainly retouch photos in GIMP, or even in Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows XP. But what if you want to use seam-carving in your photo-retouching? PSP7 ain't got that. Once you know that your use-case dictates a modern version of some memory-hogging software, well, that constraint dictates what kind of computer is "obsolete" or not for you.

What about hardware Apple doesn't ship? Or support that is buggy? What about GPU support using a non Apple-only APIs (I'm looking at you Metal).

> What about GPU support using a non Apple-only APIs (I'm looking at you Metal).

My Unity projects work out of the box.

> the device is obsolete.

One of my biggest complaints about Apple is the difference between what I consider to be obsolete and what they do.

As to your last point regarding incompatible hardware, you can use tools like this to patch the installer.

http://dosdude1.com/catalina/

> There's no real package manager

I like Homebrew -- is it not adequate enough for your needs?

There’s also macports, tends to have more packages, updated more often. Maybe what he meant was batteries aren’t included?

I don’t... I don’t want to rebuild my kernel? I want my goddamn computer to compute. I want to get my work done, then maybe order Chipotle. At least the Mac sleeps properly when I close the lid, unlike every Linux laptop I’ve ever had.

My Thinkpad T460p on ubuntu sleeps properly when I close the lid, every time, which is better than Windows managed on the same machine. I am running a stock kernel though.

I’m glad it works for you. It doesn’t work for me, on top of the myriad other Linux things that don’t work for me that, although well within my capability to fix, I would rather not have to deal with.

Right, yours does. OK.

All macs do.

Well done - a function works well on a restricted set of hardware which the OS has been tested thoroughly against. How do you expect that same thing to be achieved with the hundreds of potential laptops out there which could run Linux?

> a function works well on a restricted set of hardware which the OS has been tested thoroughly against

So--mac and linux are equal?

Who cares? The tribulations of the creator are not the concern of the end user.

If i can expect a macbook to work properly running macos, but can't expect a laptop running Linux to work properly, that's all I need to know. I'm not going to be all "I guess it doesn't matter that my laptop doesn't sleep, they have hundreds of models to account for!" and just deal with it.

On my Lenovo sleep works as good as on my older Macbooks. Not having a power saving sleep mode as good as the Macs was one of my main complaints when switching away from Apple. The key to success was the systemd's hybrid sleep mode. With it I can use the Lenovo just as the Macs, that is: never switch off, just close the lid and restart work when I open it again. As a bonus it also properly hibernates when it runs out of battery (just as the Macs do).

"no real package manager" [MacPorts has existed nearly as long as the public OS][0] and was even hosted by Apple until a few years ago.

(And there's the App Store, which is effectively a non-technically-inclined-user's "package manager".)

[0]:https://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsHistory

Cool stuff I used to do when I had time to spare back in the 90's at the university shared flat.

I don't want to do any of that any more.

Either it works out of the box, or it doesn't.

> Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.

The latest version of MacOS supports hardware from 2012. High Sierra (released 2 years ago) supports hardware from 2009 and 2010, and very little if any software released today won't run on it.

speaking as someone with a long history of old macs, I'm very comfortable in saying this is a straw-man argument that doesn't matter BECAUSE every single mac I have ever had that they've dropped support for has been EFFING PAINFUL to use long before they dropped support. I've been using Macs since the Mac SE. Apple maintains support for their devices long after any reasonable person that wasn't dirt poor would have replaced them. Any poor person in the US would probably be better off going to the library and using the crappy free computers there, because macs that old are ridiculously slow.

> There's no real package manager.

There's no "real package manager" on any of the BSDs; package managers are a Linux-ism. BSDs (like Darwin) have base-systems, developed and released as a whole; and then, separately, userlands, delivered through some kind of ports system. Critically, nothing in the base system is ever dependent on the userland; the system always works fine with zero userland ports installed.

Under such a paradigm, there's absolutely no difference between a first-party ports ecosystem and a third-party one.

> You can't upgrade your hardware. Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.

Personally, I like the era of disposable computers. Most computers have got hardly anything in them these days, anyway; just an SoC and a battery. What would you upgrade? It'd be like upgrading the parts in an electric toothbrush. In both cases, there's just a few parts, and they all wear out at about the same rate, such that when the device is worn out, it's all worn out. Just get a new one, and recycle the old one for scrap (i.e. what Apple does when you use their trade-in program.)

The complaints usually refer to hardware customization (RAM, for instance). Now they glue components in and discourage the ability to change components whatsoever.

Agreed. I didn't immediately like OS X when I switched to it from Linux at home (and eventually Windows at work), but once I got the right set of 3rd party utilities (tiling app, keyboard shortcut modifiers, launcher, UNIX package manager, etc), it was a great fit.

I think it'd be difficult to get the keyboard shortcut mappings I have working even in Linux -- Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts everywhere without interfering with the more typical keyboard shortcuts.

Another thing is that if I really need something from Linux or Windows, I can either run a VM, boot into one of those OSes natively, or remote desktop to a server with good remote desktop performance. Hackintosh's are a possibility though have their rough edges, and macOS runs better in a VM these days from what I hear, but macOS is my preferred host OS anyway for things like audio/music production apps and video editing, so I'd want to run macOS natively over other OS's anyway. For the stuff I currently do, Linux and Windows run fine in a VM.

So, going with the original analogy, macOS is like a hotel where you can have your own house inside.

"I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are standard interfaces to per-application Preferences and keyboard shortcuts. When I sit down to use someone else's Mac, I have no idea how to use it!"

I run an environment, on OSX, similar to this although (I assume) much less ambitious in the customization.

My biggest problem is the lack of focus-follows-mouse. I had this in the snow leopard days with an add-on called "mondomouse" which is abandonware and I attempted to solve it with "dwellclick" but that isn't really designed for what I need and doesn't work.

Now I see that in very, very new versions of OSX there is some buried setting in accessibility that does honest-to-god focus-follows-mouse (as in, raise window as if I clicked it when I hover over) ... can anyone confirm/deny ?

A coworker of mine used the X11 application (or XQuartz?)'s terminal windows for their focus-follows-mouse.

The only reason mouse focus was ever useful to me is NOT raising the window. That way you can type at one window while reading the other. Otherwise you are just saving ... one click? ... when your hand is already on the mouse? Why not Cmd-TAB instead?

> The only thing I can think of is that I can't use a different window manager

There are some third-party macOS window managers out there. Personally I use Amethyst. I'm sure they're not as powerful as Linux WMs can be, but it suits my tiling needs when I have an external monitor plugged in.

Last time I used a Mac (about a year ago) I could not for the life of me figure out how to add shortcuts for repositioning windows across monitors. It seemed the only way was through a 3rd party paid app.

Remapping keyboard is ridiculously hard for example.. I had a somewhat working solution (never 100%) and one update destroyed everything (i think it was sierra)

How do I remove Siri so that it never comes back to ask if I want to enable it? Just disabling doesn’t work, it comes back asking to be turned on

Get back to me when you can figure out how to upgrade your ram.

Huh? I had 0 problems upgrading the RAM in my 2011 MBP. Have they made it inaccessible since then?

Unfortunately, yes. Several years ago they started soldering the RAM directly to the motherboard, and don't provide any ram slots. So, whatever amount a unit shipped with is the max it will ever have.

I'm still using a mid-2009 MBP. Upgraded the RAM, replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and just last week installed Catalina on it. It's still my daily driver lol.

People always criticize the lack of customization too as though it's an inherent flaw, like things must be customizable or not be good and I disagree. I love having my Windows Desktop to tinker on, but my Macbook is my workhorse. I don't care if I can customize it to any great degree. I've paid a lot of money for that machine and I expect it to work, without troubleshooting, and without fiddling. I akin it more to going to a very nice restaurant and spending $150+ for a dinner for two: I don't want to give the chef my recipe for some mediocre meal, I want the chef's recipe because it's likely going to be amazing.

Tl;dr: Customization is highly overrated.

Except you are paying 150 $ for a dinner and they are serving you a very over priced average meal and you can't even add anything to it to make it better.

Do you want some oil on it(ram)?

It's 80 euros because you have to ask the chef assistant (apple store)

Do you want different kind of pasta which is the standard for that receipe? (Nvidia GPU)

You can't

So what are you really paying for?

The forniture?

I go to a museum if I wanna see some fine classy decor...

In an expensive restaurant adding salt or oil to your meal is an insult to the chef.

Somehow I imagine that the same people who hate macbooks probably also hate fancy restaurants where adding salt is an insult to the chef

I have eaten at some incredibly fancy restaurants and I think the chef would have to be an incredibly self-centered dick to have an issue with me adding some salt or oil to the dish - everyone has different tastebuds, if I want more soil then judging that is silly.

> Tl;dr: Customization is highly overrated.

False. Adding 16GB or 32GB RAM makes real difference to any machine. But it's not profitable for Apple, they want you to buy new one.

Apple is not even close to being the only company selling laptops with soldered RAM.

All the popular competitors to the MacBook Pro have soldered RAM including the XPS 13 and ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Really the truth of the matter is that for 95%+ of people, RAM requirements have completed plateaued in the last 5-8 years or so.

No, they just suffer through a sluggish experience and don't know any better.

> Apple is not even close to being the only company selling laptops with soldered RAM.

They were certanly the first to implement that and starters of the wider trend.

Certainly? Were they verifiably first, or is that a guess? What about ultraportables like the Sony Vaio UX series?

I would argue that consumers demanding portability is not a “trend.”

And the only way to deliver true portability is to combine components. e.g. smartphones.

Yes, the non-upgradability of RAM on MacBook Airs and later other MacBooks has been widely called out in reviews and media at the release of those models. You can easily verify that by going back to read those reviews.

That doesn't mean that it was the first, just the first that they bothered to look for that... which makes sense, because apple's hardware is generally going to be under more scrutiny than other manufacturers.

Adding RAM aftermarket is not important. Paying a reasonable price is. If Apple didn't charge $100 per 4GB of RAM (actual retail price in absence of lock-in: $20) and just shipped 16GB on every device at a fair price, there would be no problem (except Apple couldn't soak their whales for upgrades and replacements

Reply on news.ycombinator.com