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Comment by nightfly | Hacker News Reader

I'm a long time Linux user who got an M1 Macbook Air from work having about the inverse problem. Every little thing costs like $10-50 and it adds up. And the level of polish I've seen isn't really _that_ great. I've paid for things like BetterTouchTool, BetterSnapTool, and Alfred for basic easy features. I still can't get BetterTouchTool to reliably start on boot :/

At this point I've stopped trying to refine my work environment anymore, just because I'm tired of being nickeled and dimed for every little thing

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What do those window management tools accomplish that Rectangle doesn’t for free? I recently switched to macOS as a daily driver for work and the non-existent window management in macOS is disappointing

I use Magnet and it's pretty much everything I ever wanted after being on Windows for 13 years.

Another trick for new macOS users: the solid and excellent free tools are almost invisible.

Most long-term macOS users have a collection that they’ve added to slowly over time as they discovered them on various sites.

Instead of BetterSnapTool, just use Rectangle (brew install rectangle).

Re: Alfred, I think it's best in class, and I'm personally happy to pay for it. There's free alternatives (Raycast or w/e it's called), but they're years away in features and usability.

I gladly pay for stuff. That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date.

Open source relies on the kindness of strangers, sometimes a project has critical mass (or a corporate sponsor) to keep it alive, others just fizzle out. Then I need to spend time finding a replacement.

For example: this is why I chose Newsblur as my Google Reader replacement, they took my money. And I haven't regretted my choice even once.

Oh and Alfred really doesn't have a replacement anywhere. I bought Soulver just because of the Alfred integration.

> That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date.

If you use OSS, anyone can keep the software up to date.

Yes, but very few actually will.

It requires someone who is already invested in the software, preferably using it themselves and also has the skills to keep the development going.

Unless the software is fairly niche it’s not uncommon. For example a better maintained fork of youtube-dl made front page just yesterday.

For every youtube-dl there are a dozen that just fade away into obscurity.

The creator no longer cares or uses the software themselves. Maybe they hand off the repo to someone else, who in turn gets crushed under the load and disappears.

I think once the software reaches some critical mass of users it won’t suffer from this problem. So maybe you just use more niche software than me because to me lack of maintainers hasn’t been a problem in practice.

> Oh and Alfred really doesn't have a replacement anywhere.

It has, but it is also macOS only: Launchbar. My personal pain points are also apps like DevonThink and Hammerspoon/Keyboard Maestro.

I’m also long time Linux user and thinking for swapping to Mac on new MBP releases. Are you telling me that I can’t use same tools anymore than in Linux? I dont really care abot gui tools or gui tweaking. Terminal and browser is enough. I have lived with the illusion that almost anything with source code is possible to make work. E.g brew even automates this.

I switched from Linux to an M1 MacBook Air when it came out. I just don't sign into iCloud or use the app store and I have a pretty great experience. The battery life is fantastic and I just install applications from developer's websites.I use FireFox for browser, built in Terminal, Enpass (password manager), Parallels Desktop (VMs), Thunderbird, and Joplin for notes. That's really all I use. So no need for any of the other Apple ecosystem. I do use brew to use stuff like tmux and a few other cli tools.

The shipped userland is either out of date or uses BSD (not GNU) tools. Install updated GNU tools using brew.

Be forewarned that brew is slow and unreliable compared to apt or dnf. The compiler Apple ships also has weird defaults; you may need to reconfigure your builds.

Alternatively, just build in docker (but beware that docker performance is worse than Linux).

> Install updated GNU tools using brew. Be forewarned that brew is slow and unreliable compared to apt or dnf.

Time to port apt-get to the Mac?

There's many FOSS alternatives out there, they're just not as easy to find!

[1] I've been a Ubuntu user for 6 years and just got a Mac for work.

Side note, I’ve recently switched to Raycast after seeing them advertise an appkit role on HN and found it be a really great Alfred replacement. Not sure what the future business model is but it’s free right now.

https://www.raycast.com

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