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I've lost hope that Linux will ever be able to provide an experience on the level of the Mac, I'd like to move away from Apple myself too.

Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as coherent and interoperable as the Mac.

How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering, copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widget and text field in the OS if every framework an application is built with and every part of the OS chain can be swapped out for something else and they're all made with distributed teams with no one at the helm to be the one to say "Drag and drop is broken in your app, you might not use it or care but others do, you need to fix it". or "Why does the text look weird in your app?"

This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

Not to mention the specific things I point out here that make the Mac great are being eroded away as more and more Mac apps are just electron wrapped React with custom text field components that disable OS spell checking and things like that.

> This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

They’ll be running apps, but the lines between iPhone, iPad, and Mac will be blurred and I think this is fine. Similar to how apps now may have different features or layouts as you switch from iPhone to iPad.

I’m a little less worried about them deprecating macOS. They could do it tomorrow really but there doesn’t seem to be a need to do so. I think the goal here is to actually make the Mac stronger by unlocking access to the iOS App Library. It’s a good goal. I know some will complain about the iOS apps not being open source or something but probably 95% of users (myself included) don’t really care. I find open source software extremely valuable, but I don’t care if Flappy Bird or Office 365 are open source. I just need to use the software and get on with my day.

i would move to windows/wsl then. windows UI and tools are vastly underrated. start here if you're interested:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/scott-hanselmans-2021-ultimat...

> I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

I don’t understand comments like this because iOS apps as well as macOS apps are built using macOS devices. While it may come to pass that iOS becomes a viable platform to develop iOS and macOS (?!) apps, Apple cannot proceed by removing the ability to develop apps on both platforms.

Apple has proved itself a canny organization with regard to the development and maintenance of its platforms (bugs and pain points notwithstanding), so it seems highly unlikely they would move forward in a way that prevents the development and maintenance of those major platforms.

> I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

The Mac sits in an awkward position indeed, especially with Apple giving a touchpad and keyboard to the iPad Pro.

I don't worry about them deprecating MacOS. Apple has some important and beneficial constituencies for MacOS, not least of which is developers developing apps for iOS, watchOS, etc. Music and video production, etc. I know that by percent of revenue, iOS has the lion's share, but I think they realize that MacOS has an important role to play in keeping the entire enterprise working together.

Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.

Wow...TIL...

Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS, a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover. Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very useful feature. Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.

Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden.

Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens.

Just tell us how to use it.

Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison seems to have understood this basic concept of educating the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far behind especially on macOS.

My guess is that this is the compromise they strike to reduce the "number of options" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac

Yeah I found out you can combine two videos in QuickTime by dragging one into the other. Amazing but I had to Google it

Wow, that really beats ffmpeg’s concat demuxer

You can shift/cmd select a few pages and drop them out into finder as a new pdf too.

It also works on Gif images. You can take apart the frames.

I use Preview for merging + deleting pages which is rare but useful but otherwise I use Skim.

Do be careful, though, when collating PDFs with Preview. I've had several experiences where the resulting file works fine in Preview, but can't be opened by other PDF readers, e.g. Acrobat Reader. Share the file with a non-Mac user and they'll be scratching their head…

I have to do a lot of PDF manipulation for my work, and after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there's no substitute for Acrobat Pro.

What I have found is that when annotating PDF's the annotations show up, except on Acrobat. Never could figure out how to fix.

> I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures

It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a decline.

Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.

Multi-touch doesn’t get in the way of the screen on Mac. Also doesn’t require changing how you hold the device.

The point being, multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going, especially on the Web. Whereas now…

What do you mean by that?

Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of this was capacitive touch screen technology that few other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years later.

I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction model had for a decade been oriented around styluses - handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the time the iPhone came along.

Yeah. The T-Mobile G1 lacked multitouch gestures. You could hack them in though as the hardware supported it. I think it was a patent issue or someething which was why it was left out.

> What do you mean by that?

Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.)

(Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)

I bought an iPhone on day one in 2007. For me it was more about a nearly-all-screen device with a usable browser and navigation than anything else at that point. Jeez, that’s still mostly what I use it for. Pinch is certainly nice, but I hardly thought about multi touch when looking at the value proposition. The Apple Pencil is what got me to finally buy an iPad (and immediately miss the side-click I’ve been used to with computer pens since circa 2001).

The second-gen pencil can be tapped on the side with a fingertip while holding it, much like the buttons of old.

> multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going

Massive citation needed. When I bought the first iPod touch (at the time it was a gen 1 iPhone without the GSM modem) it was because it had a real web browser and not the BS 'mobile' browsers on my Windows Mobile smartphone. I could actually visit a store's website and find their hours, check if an item was in stock, etc. There wasn't even an app store back then... IIRC multitouch was only used for zooming into photos in the photos app.

Pinch & zoom was the killer app to navigate normal websites (as opposed to dedicated XHTML + handheld-stylesheet). This is now for the most dead with `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard.

Hmm what decline? The only thing that comes to mind is the removal of force-touch but that's not a multi-touch gesture.

When multi-touch first appeared it was touted as a Holy Grail of UIs.

The only multi-touch gesture that is in widespread usage across all mobile platforms is pinch to zoom. The rest of the multi-touch gestures are probably used 100 times less (maybe less, I can't even remember the last time I used 2+ fingers to do something on my Android devices, except for pinch to zoom).

I use all sorts of multi-touch gestures on my iPad. Less, it’s true, on the phone.

It is annoying that many web pages and apps can’t zoom in/out on iOS. On the Mac it’s trivial to zoom the whole screen.

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience.

This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don’t sync to 1Password.com though and that’s all that is available, so it’s more than just a poor experience for me.

I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that’s had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird issue that when I edited something in Keepass, it was unreadable in Linux. I didn’t have a problem if I shared it via USB drive though.

Pass is fantastic: https://www.passwordstore.org/

I ran 1Password 4.x on WINE successfully for a long while but the browser extensions started breaking so I eventually bit the bullet and switched to Bitwarden (running my own instance with bitwarden_rs). The import wasn't perfect (it doesn't handle attachments or tags), and the browser extension can sometimes be laggy, but so far it's at least worked everywhere I need it, which is more than can be said for 1PW or anything else.

I've been keeping a Keepass database on Dropbox (encrypted with password + key file, neither of which are stored on Dropbox, obviously) for a while, and haven't noticed any issues with syncing. I'm mostly using it from a single device, though, but I don't think it should be likely for the sharing to introduce problems even if I made heavier use of multiple devices. It's not like the database is constantly being modified.

This might be a bit of a lazy solution, but it has been working well enough for me.

I’ve been doing the same for years. It’s also a good cross platform solution since both Dropbox and keypass are available for Mac, windows and Linux.

I like Keepass but I am looking to drop Dropbox and I need to be able to sync it with mobile as well.

have you tried syncthing? i have it running on a synology nas that acts as the always-on server part, but i used syncthing just fine for over a year without it as well. you just have to be very conscious about having both devices turned on at the same time so they can sync to each other. you pretty much have to do the same thing with dropbox anyway, i.e. let a large file upload to their server before you turn off your computer

I've been doing it for years, no issues.

And on Android I use Keepass2Android, which also syncs to the same Dropbox folder, it works seamlessly.

It’s the reason I switched to LastPass and then Bitwarden finally.

> - I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features

Next time you give linux a try, you might want to check out https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ and https://syncthing.net/. I'm not a Mac user but I'd be surprised if between these you'd be missing any features.

+1 for KDE Connect. I had a friend who nearly shit their pants when they realized that "Continuity Clipboard" and "Airdrop" weren't iPhone-exclusive features.

I just wish you could use KDE Connect on iOS... is there anything in that realm?

My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience. This is getting better - they're producing a native app now. Said native app needs to support the local browser extensions though!

The desktop app is pretty good now, and if you’re using the Beta browser extension, it can talk to the desktop app to unlock. This feature is still in development, though, and has some restrictions.

That's great! I've seen it make superb progress over the last year or so. Looking forward to it hitting feature-parity with mac and windows :)

> it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor setups with X11,

I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the reason.

I hate touchpads.

I don't do PDF editing.

Everything's a tradeoff.

If you rotate a monitor (portrait mode) screen tearing becomes very frequent.

+1

I do indeed have a portrait monitor for throwing terminals on to, and it's the worst place for making tearing visible.

I have a portrait 4k monitor in my setup and haven't seen any tearing.

Out of curiosity (not to question), is this on Xorg or Wayland?

I rarely use my external monitor, and I can't even remember the last time I had used it in portrait mode, so these comments made me realize there could be use cases (and not just hardware or drivers) that trigger tearing that I just hadn't encountered. But I just took a quick shot at it, and I didn't see tearing, at least not on YouTube, nor when moving a window around.

I'm on Wayland with Intel graphics.

I was wondering if I just wasn't very sensitive to tearing, because I haven't noticed it. One setup is a 4K 46" or Dell 30" next to a 4K laptop, the other is 4K 46" with two 1080P wings in portrait.

The recently released GNOME 40 has some new gestures enabled out of the box (3 finger vertical swipe for application switcher and horizontal for workspace switcher) and they work much better than previous attempts I've seen at touchpad gesture on Linux. The animation actually tracks your fingers now!

And can you change them? Or is gnome still less customisable than even macOS?

From what I've seen, it's very customizable. There's a custom Gestures app that allows you to bind an infinite amount of gestures to any shell command you want.

>is gnome still less customizable than even macOS?

Gnome has been more flexible since 2003, seeing as I haven't seen someone successfully replace the MacOS stylesheet. On Gnome, it's a 2 minute process, tops.

Thunderbird has "move to junk" on 'J'. I haven't found a way to deactivate that. Ultra annoying.

Evolution is fine, but I really wish Gnome's Mail and Calendar apps would get more love and development as they look modern and minimalistic. The accounts management is lacking support for the general case, sadly. And GPG...

> Thunderbird has "move to junk" on 'J'. I haven't found a way to deactivate that. Ultra annoying.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbkey...

This add-on will allow you to customise (remove!) the very annoying single-key shortcuts

> - Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've never been able to get on with the console clients, and I actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay.

If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished.

https://getmailspring.com/

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

What the...

What’s the caveat with mailing lists?

I took that to mean if email was your day job you'd need to see emails in Outlook and Gmail, not a potentially great but uncommon mail client.

Regarding Preview, Gnome has an app called sushi that acts similarly, though in a read-only way. I don't usually use it much, but it seems to work on most videos and photos I've thrown at it.

As far as phone integration, KDEConnect is quite good, though it only works if the devices are in the same network.

> - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First class PDF support, ability to easily annotate anything, makes basic PDF editing easy.

How is the generation of 2D bar codes that many (government) forms use when you enter information into the various fields?

The only thing I like about windows is the image preview. You can easily scroll through a folder and look at all the images while you window is maximized. You can do the same in MacOS but I don’t think gallery is as good.

Previews capabilities are much better than any any built in tool or Adobe reader.

> Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky

Have you tried Mailspring?

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience

Maybe a good time to try something open-source such as Bitwarden? The fact that 1password is closed-source is a major disadvantage.

Re: mail client - it's been quite a while since I last used it, but I really liked Sylpheed on Linux. Lightweight, good looking, doesn't get in your way. You might want to give it a try if you haven't already.

I use Preview a lot just for batch resizing, I use KDE as desktop on my home computer and while Gwenview seems to be on par, it just cannot do batch resizing...

>Yes, Firefox has Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync stuff too, but there's nothing as all-encompassing.

You're looking for Nextcloud.