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Comment by kaptain | Hacker News Reader

I tried switching to Windows about 2 years ago from macOS. I found that the lack of a good replacement for Preview was a real deal breaker for me. I tried a lot of different things to make it work. It wasn't the only thing, but the fact that I spent so much time finding a PDF viewer/light-editor that didn't have adware, was free, and had enough functionality was difficult (in my case I was unsuccessful) on Windows. Hopefully they'll include a great PDF viewer/editor. Making PDF ubiquitous on macOS was a real smart move.

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I'm the opposite. I can't believe that Finder is the best Apple can do for a file explorer. It is an absolute abomination and after 4 years of using my MBP I still hate it passionately every time I have to use it.

I agree that preview is nice, as is Spotlight. But for me, OSX is getting too locked down at this point as a "power user". The sandbox makes apps take obscenely long to open like as if I've been teleported to the 90s with spinning disk laptop hard drives. A bunch of useful preview extensions all broke with Catalina's latest efforts to lock things down more and more. I hate how many hoops you are forced to jump through to get any non appstore app to get installed.

I thought OSX + MBP would be a solid and stable experience but I've been plagued by a well known kernel panic based error very frequently when I plug into a dock, resulting in hard reboots.

I'm definitely going to switch back to Windows with my next laptop. I'm sure there will be things I will miss, but OSX hasn't lived up to my expectations. I do most of my work on an Ubuntu box via VNC/SSH, and the lack of CUDA support makes the MBP kinda useless for prototyping ML/DL stuff as well.

> I'm the opposite. I can't believe that Finder is the best Apple can do for a file explorer. It is an absolute abomination and after 4 years of using my MBP I still hate it passionately every time I have to use it.

Brother, I feel you. I hate finder so much I operate almost exclusively from the command line in os x.

What don't you like about it?

The 3 panel thing is weird to me. There's no way to customize it, and it just feels really awkward to use. The UI is chock full of stuff that does not matter to me.

Why don't you just use normal list or detail view? I don't use 3 panes either.

https://www.lifewire.com/thmb/vSLzUT0-KVRp7uMtbjOa3qsYMmk=/1...

When Vista came out I was one of the few ones that loved it and was excited about the slew of features that Windows Explorer brought. Every field of photos and MP3s was visible, sortable, groupable, editable.

Then I tried macOS 10.4 and found the Finder an absolute joke in comparison and other than QuickLook in 10.5 there haven't been any improvements since. The only things that the Finder has going for it are QuickLook and the columns view, everything else is pretty subpar.

Nowadays I don't do much file management (or so I lie to myself) so my Mac is good enough for that.

I'm the opposite. I've never had a complaint about Finder. It's been pleasant to use for years.

What's wrong with the Finder? I don't have any complex requirements beyond an occasional regex file renaming, but I'm curious to know what file manager capabilities Mac users are missing out on.

That's so interesting. I tried to learn Windows Explorer shortcuts but I could never get the kind of fluency I had with OS X Finder. For example, I had to use a mouse to select a file in order to change the name, but I was able to do it with a keyboard exclusively in MacOS X. Also, I was never able to master the File Explorer's layout where they had the entire file tree in one pane and then the specific directory contents in the other. I always found Finder in MacOS X easier to manipulate: I could jump through the different views easil (command-1,2,3,4). Granted, the column view was very inconsistent, but I found the other views "just worked" the way I thought about them.

> I can't believe that Finder is the best Apple can do for a file explorer. I

Try Forklift, you might like it if you hate Finder.

Try Okular made by KDE (yes there's a Windows version of Okular). Free, open-source and lightweight.

Did you try SumatraPDF?

I did. Preview just had too many features that I was used to. Preview was a great reader...and if I found a great reader on Windows I found that it wasn't a great annotator (which Preview was). Man, I tried so many different things. Eventually I just gave up.

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