I miss MacOS keyboard shortcuts a bit, but most of the software I use for work and personal projects (emacs, terminal/tmux, docker) runs an order of magnitude faster. I love having a real package manager again, and I get first class support for most of the developer-centric tooling I really care about (e.g. Nix).
I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs, but seeing two coworkers have to switch away from them because critical dev tooling isn’t functional, reading about the SSD write issues recently, and now this about the insane size of update files helps temper the temptation.
I agree with you on software. Real package managers are great.
I hate to say it, because it’s so against what Linux has been for 25 years, but it would be great if there was a $99 distro with a heavily tweaked window manager that looks consistent across most apps, doesn’t have huge top bars, and conforms to macOS keyboard shortcuts. A lightning fast Spotlight analog would be great too. I recognize I can probably get pretty close to this vision with a patchwork of already available software but I want someone to tie a bow on it and maintain it for me.
I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.
A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved.
The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that.
I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.
I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place.
I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows.
It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.
Highlight text, then middle click
Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)
If your trackpad has multitouch, triple touch should correspond to the middle click. Works for me on Linux by default.
In many cases I do just highlight and right-click where I want the text pasted. But that workflow doesn't work a large portion of the time and I need a clipboard that isn't being wiped out almost any time I click on something.
Oof, is this the normal Linux behavior? That sounds annoying. In MacOS every app (or even tab) has its own separate highlight that it maintains. So in your example, selecting text in the browser would leave the terminal unaffected, and when you bring the terminal back to the foreground your text is still highlighted.
Use middle click.
It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste.
if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c
If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c
If there's a running process and selected text, it copies
It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c
---
Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal.
One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.
Now Apple is becoming more and more unworkable to use as a unix system, and Linux is really much better now. Only gap is still first-party software unfortunately but luckily I don't really ever need stuff like photoshop and office personally.
If you do, check out CrossOver: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
It's a straight up Microsoft Office suite clone for Mac and Linux, which can open, save, AND create MSOffice formats (.docx, etc.).
In attempt to sum things up, I'd say that many of the woes of the modern Linux desktop stem from being stuck between different worlds — one example would be with the X11 vs. Wayland situation. Wayland has slowly been improving over time, but there are still concessions that are being made by using either. I understand that transitions are difficult and that particular case is being made more difficult by parties like Nvidia, but the end result is a degraded end-user experience that won't be fixed until the transition is over.
There are also configurations that are better supported by Wayland than X11, not to mention Wayland handles things like trackpad gestures better (which at this point, X11 is never going to get better at), so even if it's not yet production ready there are reasons why some might want to use it.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-aga...
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefault
It seems reasonable to expect that these two distro's are the main ones in use by people who don't know enough to pick for themselves.
"I downvoted you for lack of details"
FFS.
Have you heard of... asking?
2. Have you setup full disk encryption? Unless tweaked (thanks to Cloudflare kernel patches) dm-crypt will cause short system freezes.
3. Firefox is still an unfortunate story on Linux. Still no hardware acceleration enabled by default (and just in the last year, I think, made toggleable universally in about:config)
I have to admit that otherwise its not all roses in Linuxland. Fedora for example, a couple of versions ago switched their upgrade peocedure to the awful download now, reboot system and wait for updates to complete. Basically upgrades feel like Window upgrades now. Maybe that's the way they want to "force" users to swith to Fedora Silverblue :)
Here is their blog post about the whole topic: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryptio...
You're happy now, but wait until you try using the trackpads.
There's only one company in the world that cares enough about ergonomic fit and finish to make a laptop that's actually pleasant to use over long periods of time: Apple. The kinks will be worked out with the M1s and macOS in general, and then Linux will look like the joke it is by comparison again.
I do try to use the mouse as little as possible on whatever system I’m using, but even when I have to, it’s no problem. Just as a point of comparison, I don’t think the trackpads on these machines are anywhere near as much worse (for me) compared to the MacBooks as the keyboards on the MacBooks on the past couple of generations (2018? whenever they added the zero travel keyboards that constantly broke) were compared to literally any other keyboard.
If you’re interested in the gains on the M1 but dissatisfied with macOS, I encourage supporting the development of native Linux on M1, Asahi Linux. Please contribute however you can. I can’t do the groundwork, so I joined up on Patreon.
I switched from Kaby Lake-based Core i5 MacBook Pro to Kaby Lake-based Core i5 Linux laptop half the cost due to the Big Sur issues and the productivity has improved several fold.
The apps just opens at the blink of an eye, A phrase often used to describe M1 based Macs is absolutely applicable to my Linux experience after switching from a Mac. Further with KVM, large enough RAM VMs run like any other apps without bogging down the system.
Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.
Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
I manage hundreds of Macs and the users are constantly howling about not being able to use Big Sur yet. I can explain there are still many dealbreaking bugs (the 11.2 upgrade space problem caused major headaches taking hours to fix in my testing!), it's slower and more screenspace wasteful but they keep wanting it because of Apple's snazzy PR. There's also a major issue with AD accounts getting completely blocked after the upgrade.
Of course what doesn't help is that new Macs come with Big Sur by default and can't really be downgraded. So we have to support it at least for new machines.
They force you to use it to develop any app for iOS and macOS - it's a significant financial investment to get there ( you need a mac, a developer account), if you had to pay for Xcode as well... ( to be fair, you probably pay for it in a way with the developer account)
I have being a Mac user since Apple II. All these changes really saddens me. Can we start some kind group similar to class action law suit to pressure Apple into changing this kind of behaviour in Big Sur. If not enough people upgrade, maybe they will have skip a version and come out with something more light weight. I think that happened with Snow Leopard ( don't remember the exact one).
Along with many others it seems, Catalina is the last version of macOS I'll be using.
I have a 2013 27" iMac and as of mid-last year I was considering buying a new one sometime in 2021, but I've now changed my mind, due to decisions Apple has made about how they handle their desktop operating system.
Apple doesn't care about a group but they do care about money. So do like many of us and stop giving them your money. It's all we can really do.
Sorry for the confusion!
Been on Apple desktops ever since. But the decline in the last several years has been sharp and no longer tolerable to me. I'm still on a Mac dekstop but I'm on 10.11 and will never upgrade. As OSX becomes closer and closer to an iOS-style user-hostile walled garden, I'm not interested. It'll be back to a Linux (maybe, BSD) desktop after this machine no longer works.
Windows is the perfect platform for us because it makes our applications so much less expensive to develop. We are a profitable company with hundreds of B2B customers and thousands of users that deploy on their own hardware and we can deliver our software without Docker or anything because the application just runs on any Windows version since XP. It's basically write and forget (apart from a few hickups here and there when Windows Update accidentally breakes something).
We have been working for years to replace parts of the VB6 application with modern .NET libraries and while this is unsupported by Microsoft, it's still working. The VB application hosts the modern .NET libraries and integrates its functionalities and new functionality is exclusively developed in .NET. Our development speed is not impacted by deprecated APIs that we have to urgently address. We can take our time to improve things without our customers noticing.
If we were supporting macOS, we would have shut down a long time ago. It would've been impossible for us to keep up with yearly macOS API changes and to add new features at the same time.
This isn’t even nation state level attacks, it’s pretty standard behavior for botnets and ransomware.
Extra malicious hosts are never great but this isn't exactly a dealbreaker.
It's not a part of Windows itself per se, but a runtime environment. Couldn't you just as well have written an app in Java, which has also kept good backwards compatibility and could still be run on both Windows and MacOS with minimal changes?
If there were a version of Visual Basic for Mac released alongside the Windows version back in 1998, it would have been a classic Mac app which Apple dropped support for after Mac OS 10.4 and never had on Intel-based Macs.
If Microsoft had updated this theoretical Visual Basic for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X back in 2008, Apple would have dropped support for it with Catalina, which ditched 32-bit app support.
What you're hoping for just wouldn't have worked except for a runtime that was still being supported by the publisher to make the jump from Mac Classic to OS X and then again from 32-bit to 64-bit as Apple broke backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft had somehow brought Mac VB out of retirement twice and done both of the above, Apple would be dropping support for it again a few years from now when they drop Rosetta and only support M1-based apps on Mac OS.
However until then, UWP apps will keep running.
While dropping support for VB would have had negative consequences and using Java may have been better, we only know that in hindsight. Java was about half the age of VB at that point in time, it's most vocal advocates seemed to be more interested in cutting Microsoft down to size, while it had a mixed reception among both developers and end users. None of those qualities bode well in the long term, especially from the perspective of those invested in Microsoft technologies.
It will still run on anything from XP to Windows 10.
It probably wouldn't hurt to split that up a bit — perhaps Xcode could install only the toolchain and macOS SDKs by default with the rest being downloadable on demand, but there's definitely a lot more going on there than just IDE/text editor. It's an all-in-one appleOS development kit.
Yes, the vast majority of Xcode's size comes from inside the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms
Not only have the paid for it, but it wouldn't likely be anything more than an academic project without Apple.
(In fairness it's been improving in recent years but it's still not flexible/customizable to my TextMate taste.)
Has it? In my experience, the Swift rewrite of Xcode source editing has made it vastly more buggy. I forget exactly when this happened, Xcode 8? 9?
SwiftUI has done well to expose SourceKit/Xcode's weak spots. Nearly all of the performance improvements brought to both in the last major release were a result of SwiftUI applying pressure in the previous release.
Swift is a lovely language but the experience is thoroughly and totally ruined by Xcode. Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.
not only that, but ive seen bluetooth stack blow up and loose all connections to my keyboard/mouse under those circumstances as well
> Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.
its been slow since xcode 4... never really recovered from glomming interface builder into the ide
I remember when Xcode 4 came out. It was slow and buggy we all thought they’d fix it over the next few releases. That just never seems to have happened. It’s a pity - for all of apple’s history of amazing UX, Microsoft’s visual studio (and vs code) are vastly better IDEs for writing software.
1. keyboard repeats keys under high load situations
2. mouse cursor lags badly (like seconds) when switching darkmode or an external monitor...
yea, xcode just seems to be stuck in "itunes mode" where every release seems to just tweak thing but never fundamentally improve... i hope this doesnt forebear "apple music" version of xcode (starts sweating)
Huh? You set exactly if, how and when to update in System Preferences.
You can set it to never, always, to ask, to download but not install, etc.
It's been that way for as long as I can remember, and Big Sur doesn't appear to have changed anything. All the checkboxes are still there.
But they don't do anything. I have had all of the checkboxes off for years and I still get "Update Now" notifications.
The only work-around is to say "Update Tonight" because it won't work and will buy me a few days before I get another pushy "Update Now".
Notifications are another matter. And if users didn't get notifications how would they even know when there were updates?
Because updates include security patches it's important to nudge people towards updating.
Since Catalina, this is intentionally broken, so now you have a constant red badge on the System Preferences icon and regular notifications to update to macOS Big Shit, which in the end causes the user to ignore other updates (like security updates) they would actually want to install.
What do you mean by this? I’ve never seen anything forcing me to update.
> I'm kinda surprised that more people don't talk about the 50 gig download that xCode requires. Kinda insane for a glorified text editor.
A glorified text editor which also includes
- A machine learning model builder
- Two complete visual UI builders
- A 3D game asset previewer
- Simulators for 4 different classes of hardware device.
- Instruments - an absurdly full featured profiling and debugging system.
And those are just some of the more obvious features.
You can argue that you’d like a glorified text editor instead of XCode, but it’s weird to say that’s what XCode is.
I bet there’s a better middle ground to be found, but I’m not yet convinced that macOS is fundamentally broken beyond repair. I’m on the fence, currently.
I'm curious. What does Microsoft do that Apple doesn't? I'm a happy Windows 10 user. What should I be worried about?
They know _everything_ you do on your computer. It's of course for "your benefit". They know every application you lauch, how long it was running for, and if it had input parameters, they also know which files you opened.
They know what you search for (if you use IE/Edge), and lots of other "telemetry" data.
Here you go : https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/activity-history
Frequently visited locations ? Yup, on device. If you buy a new device, you restart your frequently visited locations.
Anything AI ? Yup, also on device. The only exception i can think of is photos with iCloud enabled. If you store your photos in the cloud, Apple will process them for faces/locations/whatever AI use. That's the reason you can enter "car and dog" into the search field on your iPhone and get all images containing both.
It's all here : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
I'd much prefer an "opt in" scenario where _nothing_ is reported unless i specifically allow it. I'm aware that some things go hand in hand, like "find my device" requires my device to report it's location, but i can't remember EVER opting in to sending every app i open, filename of every file i open, every link i browse, to them.
And for volume mixer this exists: https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic
I have to say it really doesn't seem like you spent much effort trying to actually fix your issues.
* When a Macbook is plugged into an external monitor, if you close its lid, it will only stay awake if the power cord is plugged in (otherwise it goes to sleep). There is no notification that tells the user this, you’re just supposed to know it I guess.
* On the Displays page of System Preferences, the only way to get it to re-scan for connected monitors is to hold down Alt, which makes a hidden button appear called “Detect Displays”. Again you’re just supposed to know this.
* The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it. I never see people use full screen in real life, they always maximize everything
* When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work
* Sometimes you will lose windows when you disconnect the external monitor.
* Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.
* Macos will randomly choose wallpapers for each new desktop you create, there is no setting for this behavior.
* Due to the unnecessary Cmd button, shortcuts are very difficult to remember. In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.
Honestly, I hate Macos. Windows is 10x better. I don't understand what people like about this system.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152203/turn-off-ma...
I get that this goes against your preference but to Apple it's either "your finger moves the content" or "your finger moves the viewport", and that translates to both your finger on the touchpad and on the mousewheel. Remember that Apple sells the Magic Mouse that doesn't even have a mousewheel -- the whole top of the mouse behaves like a touchpad. That's why the settings are linked.
> unnecessary Cmd button
On Apple computers the button has been used for keyboard shortcuts for the last 40 years.
> In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.
That's VS's problem, not ours and certainly not Apple's. Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.
I agree that Windows is 10x better than macOS -- at being Windows. You WILL be dissapointed if you expect macOS to be like Windows with a different skin.
This is not just my preference. This is how mouse scroll wheels have always worked. The settings for scroll wheel and track pad scrolling are shown separately too, in apples own software. You'd never know looking at it that they are linked internally. If it is a single setting, it should be a single setting!
> Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.
Is switching to next tab in safari also a "complicated shortcut"? Because that uses Ctrl too.
Yes, and touch based devices reminded us that maybe the way mouse scroll wheels had always worked was not the best way after all. Apple's defaults since Lion have been "finger moves content" on all their input methods: iDevice touch screens, touchpads, the Magic Mouse and 3rd party mouse scroll wheels. Again, you may not like it, but it's consistent. I do agree that it could be a single less-confusing setting, but the Mouse and Trackpad screens are unfortunately separate.
> switching to next tab in safari ... uses Ctrl too.
It's switching to next tab in everything, not only Safari. And the choice isn't even that weird, obviously Cmd + Tab is taken and Ctrl pairs nicely with Shift to reverse, so why not? They key is there and AFAIK Ctrl + Tab doesn't override anything important, unlike, well, Ctrl + C.
So where's the consistency? I thought all shortcuts were supposed to use Cmd as the modifier and Ctrl was only for complicated shortcuts. But switching tabs in a browser is one of the most common shortcut. So why is it Ctrl?
You can't say because "everything" else uses Ctrl in this context. Because then they should fix the mouse issue also. The crux of my problem is that shortcuts randomly use Ctrl or Cmd, there is no predictability or consistency.
But I do recognise that keyboard shortcuts rely on familiarity and tradition more than consistency and logic, so this isn't a major deal for me.
The bigger issues are the other stuff. External monitor support is as good as broken. Full screen apps are as good as unusable. OS updates regularly break critical features like Settings and Fingerprinter. And on and on. I really never had these sorts of bugs in my entire life using Windows.
macOS apps and 3rd party apps that are not ports from other platforms use Cmd as the primary modifier, i.e. the overwhelming majority of shortcuts are Cmd + something. If your apps use Ctrl a lot, they're probably Linux or Windows ports that don't respect the macOS way. There's plenty of those.
They could've used Cmd + G to go to the next tab and Cmd + H to go back (for example), but in this case it's pretty clear why they went with ctrl + tab, isn' t it? It's convenient, makes sense and it's quite close to the close-window Cmd + W and you can easily add a Shift there to go back.
> Full screen apps are as good as unusable.
I use fullscreen apps all the time (on the laptop screen or smaller monitors) and they're perfectly fine. Some people don't like the paradigm, but that's just personal preference again.
No, I love the paradigm. It's just that random stuff is broken. For example, if you have 2 chrome windows, and at least one of them is full-screen, there is no keyboard shortcut to switch between them. Cmd+` is broken.
All of these design affordances point to one single driving usecase: media consumption. Actual productive work is not a consideration.
If it allowed you to run in clamshell on battery power, you'd be able to, for example, switch your monitor to show a different input, forget about the (closed, silent) MacBook and run the battery down to zero with no indication.
> The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it.
That's because "maximize" is a Windows thing and you're not on Windows. The green button feature is called Zoom (I believe) in macOS and it's basically "resize to content". The fullscreen thingy used to be a separate button (Mavericks), which IMO was a bit better.
> When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work.
The shortcut switches between windows that are on the same Space (so that it switches between your different casual-browsing and work-related windows inside their respective spaces if you're the kind of person who keeps different spaces for different situations/projects). A fullscreen app doesn't cover other apps, like on Windows, but instead goes to its own space. That's why the shortcut can't do anything.
I've used Linux extensively in the past (and OS/2, BeOS and more. Even spent a few years as assistant head developer to a deceased linux distribution), and MacOS X just works. Yes there are usually bugs in new major versions, but _nothing_ comes close in integration, be that between apps on the machine itself, or various devices in the Apple eco system.
Yes, you can do it all with different apps on different platforms, but until you've been "all in" you have no idea what i'm talking about.
Maybe you have an app that will extend your desktop on your tablet, now right click the desktop and select "scan document with iphone" and use your phone to scan a document directly to the desktop.
Need a password on your phone that is only on your computer ? fine, select it on your computer and paste it on your iphone. No special keys involved, it just works(tm)
No other platform offers that amount of integration.
considering that Apple is in the hardware business and relatively uninterested in my personal data, i also have a tendency to trust them with my data far more than i trust anything Microsoft or Google.
I've been a very happy Mac user since 2005, and nothing i've seen in recent years has done anything to change my mind. Whatever "obstacles" people run into, they somehow miss me completely. I still run homebrew or macports on my machine, install just whatever i like, and everything works as well as it ever did.
“Freedom as in liberty”
In what way, except in the: "I can short of build myself exactly the functionality I want from disparate parts and endless customization in some Linux distro, losing other things in the process, and with the end being even more of a hodgepodge (e.g. of UI toolkits and design sensibilities), and equally subject to change with the creators of this or that distro or DE are bored and want to rewrite/redesign everything for no good reason".
IMO, the market these OS are targeting generally has no idea what "bloat" even means in the context of computers. The exceptions include people who do understand the concept but are happy to trade bloat for profit.
That is giving too much credit to Microsoft or Windows. Edit: Windows 10X [1] is quite good though.
I also think the discussion completely miss the key point of this update -
> There's a risk of damage to the notebook if you are using a non-compliant powered USB-C hub or a dock.
USB-C. For crying out loud USB-C, Again. Despite all the evidence the vocal Internet and HN still think USB-C as the holy grail. How they should be able to change using a single cable. ( Which is not true ).
I really hope the rumour of MagSafe coming back is true.