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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

"I Just recently I learned you can't add more swap ( creating a swap file and adding it ). That seems incredible to me."

At what point are you just approaching MacOS with the wrong mindset? MacOS isn't something you should or need to manage swap for or should really think about. It's the same reason you don't think about managing swap on Windows or your iPhone or your Android or your Smart TV.

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> you don't think about managing swap on Windows

I haven't really been a Windows user since Win7, but as I remember it 'increase page file size' was right up there with 'clean the registry' and 'try turning it off and on again'.

> MacOS isn't something you should or need to manage swap for

I would 100% agree with you with regards to most macOS users. But as a software dev of course this is something you might have to do every once in a while.

The fact that you can't doesn't seem to align with the fact that macOS is the operating system of choice for software devs.

AFAIK macOS will use the whole drive for swap (or at least an awfully large number of gigabytes, correct me if I'm wrong), why would you want to add more?

Swap files are created by the OS when the existing ones are full. They are removed by the OS when they are empty. There is no way to set the swap size, because it is dynamic. What is the point of setting the size yourself, besides running artificially out of swap when you need more or taking unnecessary space when you need less?

But as a software dev of course this is something you might have to do every once in a while.

In about twelve years of a variety of software development on Mac, from embedded to iOS/Mac apps to web, it has never even once occurred to me to do that. Considering that the OS will fill the disk with swap if need be, I'm trying to think of a reason to even want to do this.

>It's the same reason you don't think about managing swap on Windows

Except one of the first things I do on any Windows setup is to move the page file somewhere else or resize it.

Same here. It feels like the people going gung-ho for macbooks here are the type of people that would take their computer to best buy if they got a boot loop instead of just fixing it.

Kind of incomprehensible to me that anyone in that mindset would be a developer.

> if they got a boot loop

I have literally never seen a boot loop on a Mac.

How would that even come about?

This poster gets it.

I use macOS because there's about 1/10 the likelihood that I'll have to burn half a day fixing its fuck-ups as there is with Windows and Linux. And I did plenty of that for years before ever seriously using a Mac.

Nowadays when I check in on the Linux desktop to see how it's doing now, I notice how easy it is to get into the old habits of "oh this is pretty good, just a little tweak and I can get the audio working the way it ought to, oh and this and that" down a bunch of little rabbit-holes and pretty soon I've burned hours on stuff that sure looks like work, but is 100% unproductive. When I catch myself doing that I go "well, not ready to switch back yet, I guess, maybe next year".

I think a lot of people using Linux on the desktop either somehow manage to use it very differently from how I ever have, or are completely blind to how much time they're losing to it because they're having to work around deficiencies, put up with bad behavior, or fix stuff. That is, I think both categories of Linux desktop user exist, not that it's one or the other. I was definitely in the latter category, and can recognize that in myself now. Last I checked (a few months ago) the Linux desktop remains something I need to avoid if I don't want to end up doing a bunch of fake work.

For me personally Windows/Linux falls under the same umbrella: I'm going to largely use it as it comes from my favorite distro (or microsoft) with slight tweaks that rarely break anything. These tweaks are usually accessible via settings panels (or regedit)

For MacOS: Instead of tweaking things internally I have to reach out to third party application developers to fix things the OS lacks. Some examples: bettersnaptool to give me modern window snapping like Windows/Linux, or the Android File Transfer so I can actually access my phone.

Either way I'm having to make changes to get cozy, MacOS just means I'm going to be handing money to a few thirdparty devs by the end of it in order to get it to behave like I'm used to OS's behaving. Maybe that's my fault from growing up mostly in a Windows/Linux environment besides the few years I spent in OS8/9 in college.

I'm comfortable in all the major operating systems. It just cost more for me to get comfortable in MacOS. Not that it's a bad thing, dev's need money too.

> Maybe that's my fault from growing up mostly in a Windows/Linux environment besides the few years I spent in OS8/9 in college.

I would say so. It took me a few years to adapt from Windows/FreeBSD when I bought my first Mac.

try Elementary.

It happened to me on the big sur upgrade. Apparently there wasn't enough space on the internal HDD to finish the upgrade, but it tried anyways, got halfway done and just... failed.

> It's the same reason you don't think about managing swap on Windows

not managing swap on windows means being condmned to slowness

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