Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

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That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here.

However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily driver (even though I've always been an "every OS at the same time" guy). But my enthusiasm has reduced a lot lately due to the higher lock-in, and 'iPadification' of the Mac. Especially due to stronger ties with Apple services: As an "every OS" guy this doesn't work for me obviously. Basically it is getting decidedly harder to use Apple stuff well if you don't want to do things exactly "the Apple way". The Mac didn't use to be like that. It was more like a general unixy OS that wasn't so opinionated.

So, as my opinion has changed it is possible his admiration for Apple is irking me more than before :) Sorry if I offended by calling him a shill. But he adopts Apple's flowery language filled with superlatives as if their products are some kind of magic inconceivable to their competitors. That rubs me the wrong way as I do consider the world outside Apple which is not bad at all.

What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI.

What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.

Almost all GNU user land tools and libraries work on BSD and you can install them fairly easily with brew. Unless you are doing Linux kernel development, there is little you’ll miss out on.

I'm typing this on FreeBSD. If the most interesting part of a Mac to you is the BSD layer ... Well, I doubt that. People like Mac for the UI and Cocoa stuff, plus hardware and integration thereof.

The way you've substituted "BSD" for macOS really doesn't make sense. Yes, there is BSD code in MacOS, quite a bit of it in fact. But they're not the same thing.

You are right that people that buy a Mac don’t get it for the FreeBSD kernel. However, most people that complain about not being able to run Linux on a M1 can be just as productive with the alternatives on macOS.

For 99% of other things that run in a terminal, you can get it to work in FreeBSD/macOS. Also, for Python folks, there is anaconda distribution that is agnostic to the underlying OS. Ditto for node or ruby development. Also Gui Emacs and vi have decent ports to macOS.

That said, I guess if you are doing some custom server side development that really needs Linux, you will have a hard time with M1 - virtualization and emulation don’t mix and your code might not be portable enough.

Again as a frequent FreeBSD user, "FreeBSD/macOS" is not really a thing. There is historical shared code but they are different beasts. Sometimes there is substantial porting involved to get things from one to the other and they are not really the same entity. Additionally, the BSD pieces of macOS are frequently out of date and a hodgepodge of components.

Personally, I have very frequently had the experience that Unixy stuff that "just works" on *BSD or Linux does not work on Mac straight away, or breaks with a new OS release, etc. It takes effort for the homebrew folks or the macports folks or whatever to keep stuff working.

It's not a FreeBSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. The userspace is based on FreeBSD though.

Mostly agree, and upvoted, however I think it’s important to acknowledge (in thread about M1 Macs) that full brew support will be a large undertaking for M1.

It seems to be going well so far. I would say it's around 70% of the way there[0].

What's left is a few major runtimes (OpenJDK, golang is waiting for 1.16 to be released). Many of the packages that are not properly supported either require golang [4], rust [2], mono [3] or java to support arm64.

It's impressive the amount of work Apple has done behind the scenes get M1 support in many open source packages, [1] for example.

  [0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857
  [1] https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/mono/commit/3f2278e081484e6616ee5892895f999610453ca9
  [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73908
  [3] https://github.com/mono/mono/pull/20014
  [4] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38485

Among other problems, Safari keychain backups don’t work unless you store them in iCloud (and there’s no warning about this):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562

This does appear to be sorta documented:

Note: You can’t copy passwords stored in your Local Items or iCloud Keychain. To transfer these keychain items to another computer, set up iCloud Keychain on the other computer using your iCloud user name (normally your Apple ID) and password. You can manually copy keychains other than Local Items or iCloud Keychains to another Mac using the steps below.

https://support.apple.com/guide/keychain-access/copy-keychai...

Ah, good find! It appears that the Big Sur documentation notes this right up top, whereas for the earlier OS versions it's relegated to a note at the bottom.

Either way, I'm not sure this counts as a warning! It rather reminds me of:

As you are probably aware, plans for the development of the outlying regions of the galaxy invoke the building of a hyperspace express route through your star system. And your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.

(Shouts of terror emit around the globe.)

There's no point acting all surprised about it; the plans and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your earth years. If you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout.

Most people setting up their keychain without iCloud will never see this, and there's not even an explicit mention here of the issue with backups (though one could sort of infer that).

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