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Comment by wraptile | Hacker News Reader

I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also wrote my own compose key tool macos-compose[2] and rofi-like clone choosem[3] (eventually bought into Alfred).

Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.

Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway.

1 - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose

3 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem

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Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.

Exactly the same story here.

It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.

Same story here, and little anecdote: In a pure mac shop we had a guy apply and he brought his Linux notebook and 5mins into the interview he started hating on hiw bad macos is. Before he had to show some of his work in his linux notebook we had a little coffebreak, after we came back somehow LUKS crashed he wasn’t able to boot the system or restore the disk. We gave him a USB Stick and 3hrs to solve it or admit that he was wrong about bashing macos.

Similar experience when applying for a job at a major UK university back in 2009. My Dell laptop with Ubuntu crashed when trying to present my slides. There was an old iMac at the back of the room taunting me.

I ended up working there through a different route and bought a 2010 13” MBP that served me perfectly for four years before I sold it for an impressive amount of cash to buy a 2014 15” which was also flawless.

But is it faster? And does it actually work?

I might be unlucky, but I can't count on my two hands how many times did my 2019 MacBook Pro become unresponsive (and occasionally it restarted itself... After being unresponsive for 10 minutes). It's a work laptop and there is some admin software on it (afaik), so that might influence my experience... But after a year of use, I still sometimes feel the need to defenestrate it...

My favorite bit is that after a restart sometimes it gives me a screen where I can't change the keyboard layout.. and I can't type my password because of the special characters I use. So, I just restart again and hope I get a login screen with the keyboard layout change possible. (And yes I have changed the default layout multiple times, but it always switches back to some other default)

I hate my work-provided MacBook SO. MUCH. I begged them to give me a ThinkPad with Linux instead, and it's been a litany of problems in the three months I've been using it. I did all my dev work on MacBooks between 2007-2013, but my experience this year has completely vindicated my decision to ditch the Mac at home and at work back then.

I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.)

It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. The Mac? At least it boots fast. I have to restart it once or twice a week.

Reliability aside -- and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently -- Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod.

All I can say is that my experience on macOS is completely different from yours. Invasive MDM software from employers not withstanding, I’ve never had major beachball problems that have persisted for days, I’ve never even hated the bad keyboards that much.

I’ve been using Macs since 1984. They’re not perfect, but throughout that time, they have demonstrated over and over again that they are the least horrible hardware/os platform that I have used. Some years are better, but all years have been better on macOS than any other hardware platform I have experience with.

Either a defective unit or the admin software doing something wrong. I've had many personal and work provided MacBook air/pros and never faced anything of this Actually the biggest issue I've had has been related to the terrible keyboards they used to put in the 2018~2020 models

My partner also works in tech. Between the two of us, and between home and work, we've bought or used probably 25-30 of these over the years. I gave her an M1 air this holiday season! We've had pros, airs, and iMacs in four or five different colors occupying our living spaces for fifteen or twenty years now. We've used them for work and for play, for software development and video editing and graphic design and media consumption.

My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!

In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.

Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows

If you are unable to successfully log in after two boots, you get booted into a password recovery mode that has options including "My keyboard works but I am unable to enter my password", and on the reset options, makes mention of being careful about the characters you choose...

... so a bit more commonplace than "defective unit" or "admin software".

You want to try one of the new ARM based ones. The experience is completely different.

Yes, it's like being mad that your salmon doesn't taste like tuna, even though you clearly chose it at the market.

> Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work

Huh, they said they really tried to like macOS for an entire year ...

How is it "trying to like it" when you try to replace everything and re arrange the entire OS to your liking?

I think they just tried to convert it to Linux for 1 year and that didn't work, which as I said, that's expected, it might not be the OS for you and that's fine. We're lucky we have options, and we are all not the same.

As I said in the comments, macos is for people that can accept the trade offs, that can adapt to a more rigid and propietary system in exchange for something that just works and allows you to focus on your actual work, and not on tuning your computer as if it was a hobbies sports car.

Again, nothing wrong with that, I've been like that in the past. Now I just prefer things that just work and I don't have to waste my time maintaining. We are all not the same, thanks God.

I've been using a linux laptop for years. It just works and allows me to focus on my actual work without rigid proprietary systems getting in the way. I can't remember the last time I had to spend time "tuning" my computer.

Good for you then. As I said it depends a lot how we work, what kind of work we do, and what we prefer. Enjoy it.

> for something that just works

No, it doesn’t, perhaps works better than the alternatives most of time, but definitely not all the time.

10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available.

Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support.

During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop.

Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison.

Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.

> Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore.

interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...

If I remember correctly, back in 2014 it lacked wifi and audio drivers, and the hidpi support on Linux was the main deal breaker.

I have also installed Linux on my work T2 2019 MBP, and it is looking much better but still rough around the edges and you can't use mainline kernel. At least hidpi on wayland works nicely, though not all of the apps do.

is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?

Will see how it goes. I remember how AMD open source driver started more than 10 years ago. It was not a pleasant experience on my machine. Even now on AMD APU box that I use for gaming - GPU driver crashes at least once a month.

I hope that people behind Asahi will have better luck. :)

they do have the advantage of having a much smaller range of hardware to support

If you don't like the animations why not turn them off?

It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel.

The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps.

I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.

You can disable them also from Accessibility

Thank you for this, my phone feels 2x faster now!

I just found out this myself and giving it a try. Don't think I will miss the animations :)

I have found this setting to break some apps (e.g. Spotify, my bank's app) though.

Same here. Would be nice to be able to do it on an app-by-app basis, or add exceptions.

Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.

Interesting. I switched to an AMD laptop for over half a year (ThinkPad T14 AMD). And I went back to a MacBook and convinced me not to go back to Linux on a laptop for at least half a decade.

Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).

It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.

Fair enough - I think there were a lot of teething issues with the recent amd laptops due to lack of kernel support and some bugs in the s3 bios implementation. I probably would have been similarly frustrated if I bought 9 months ago.

Fortunately the bios bugs are fixed and the latest kernel (5.15.11) supports s3 pretty flawlessly so far, although I was using traditional suspend before that without issue. I haven’t had any other issues and has been stable over the last month of usage. Temps and performance are great and around 9-10 hrs battery life. So I think it's worth buying now.

Same story with my AMD based T495. It was horrible. I also have an M1 MacBook Air now.

I lost count the amount of times it’d panic or something would break when I needed it. The same laptop was rock solid running windows and my daughter has it now as her daily driver.

t14s here (ubuntu), there was a bios update that solved the suspend battery drain issue, same with the dock as there was updates for that too that can be installed with fwupdmgr. Disabled Bios power management to allow the OS to control it and really it's pretty flawless.

I love my thinkpad t14s, it's fast and quiet and all hardware works (even lte, although does admitedly require an alpha driver, it works fine)

How is battery life?

My 16 inch Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H is good for about 10 hours of light web development

That said, I am not one to have their high refresh rate screen at anywhere near even mid brightness levels. That includes desktop, TV, phone, etc

How much does the processor scale down when you hit 68C for a while?

No throttling as far as I can tell. When using 16 virtual cores at 100%, each core tops at about 3Ghz (probably due to power limits). Temps creep up to about 68, fan goes on, and it stays there.

That's good to hear. I'm used to laptops having terrible cooling, and suffering through processor throttling when doing anything other than browsing the web. I'm guessing that performance is a function of AMD's all around better power draw and thermals.

Same here. All my Intel laptops in the last 10 years have had awful cooling, hit 90+ and throttle. So I was really surprised at the AMD performance.

why should it?

At least with the mobile Intel processors I'm familiar with, things like Turbo Boost get disabled and the cores will be scaled down in order to bring temperatures down. I figured AMD would do something similar, but I have no experience with their mobile processors.

According to Wikipedia, AMD's Turbo Core feature depends on power draw, while Precision Boost and Extended Frequency Range features depends on power and temperature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Turbo_Core

sure thing.

was refering to the figure of 68°C which i consider very low and hence asking the question "why would the thermal management enact any limits at that temperature?"

I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux:

- Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)

- macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager

- I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors

- I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine

- The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows

- All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable

- GUI feels slow compared to Windows

The whole point of the CTRL key is for control characters when using a terminal. The command key on Macs (and the subsequent key pairs) predates CTRL-Z/X/C/V by around 10 years - Larry Tesler, had conceived the notion while at PARC working on text editing for Alto, decided to use the sequence for the Lisa OS.

Originally, Windows followed the IBM CUA [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access] standard, which it still does to a great extent today - Pressing Alt will still activate the menu for instance. In this standard, the cut command was Shift+Del, Copy was Ctrl+Ins and paste was Shift+Ins; which I believe still work as of Windows 10. Microsoft introduced CTRL-Z/X/C/V in Windows 3.1, released in 1992.

In short, the keyboard shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste have been constant on the Mac since it’s inception 37 years ago. It’s been “standard” in the Windows world for 29 years

> - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)

'bit of a duh, that.

> My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager

...

FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere.

> - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows

BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool.

Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there.

> All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason

That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it:

1. macos was first

2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts

3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient

The windows key is a half-assed aping of it.

> And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

If I remember correctly there are generally fewer shortcut keys on macOS than the alternatives.

Things like controlling and moving windows is not supported without third party app.

Thus macOS is a more mouse centric operating system, but at the same time macOS has by default fewer mouse settings too (eg speed vs acceleration)

> - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

There is a reason they’re different, and it’s because those are the shortcuts that macs have used since 1985. It would extremely upsetting to Mac userbase if all of the sudden shortcuts were wincloned.

I also think that most Mac shortcuts make more sense in the modern context; they’re nearly all mnemonic (e.g. Cmd+W to close a window and Cmd+Q to quit) whereas Windows shortcuts are more arbitrary and rooted in limitations of legacy platforms (Alt+F4 doesn’t mean anything to someone new to computers, for instance).

Any more example of arbitrary and limitations of shortcut keys on Windows except close window/application?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you switch tabs with ctrl+tab but close a tab with cmd+w on macOS. How is that not arbitrary and not based on a limitation on a legacy platform?

I dunno about limitations, but similarly F5 for refresh on Windows feels quite arbitrary compared to Cmd-R.

Ctrl-Tab at least builds on the concept of [modifier]-tab cycling tabs, and Cmd-W makes sense for closing browser tabs because there tabs are functionally the “windows” you’re working with most often.

When working with a bunch of tabs and cycling thru them and wanting to close some of them based on visual decision means that you have to move your hands much more on macOS than on PC, thus ergonomically bad.

- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable

I've never come across this? Do you use some xwindows app that lays characters right on the borders or something?

> 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose

> Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in

There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool.

Settings -> Keyboard -> Text

Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)

And these sync over to your iOS devices too, where the shortcuts are even more time saving.

There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).

Great tip! Didn't know this. Thanks!

They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.

The animations are a real pain. Who decided to make the animation to switch desktops almost one second in length?

Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me.

He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere

You used to be able to modify a plist to change the duration of things like switching spaces. It stopped working around 10.14 and I really miss it.

Have you ever tried “Reduce Motion” in Accessibility -> Display?

Yes. Instead of a sliding animation with a one second duration, I get a crossfade animation with a one second duration.

This. I keep typing right after I switch screens and it ALWAYS misses the first couple of keys. It's absolutely infuriating

Is this when using fullscreen apps / spaces? I exist entirely between iterm and chrome, so I use iterms non-native fullscreen so that it’s fast to switch otherwise the OS lag is unbearable.

ctrl+Number is the fastest way to switch Spaces out of the box. Some third party apps (Total Spaces) get rid of all animations.

> so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.

My kingdom for a way to cmd-tab through all windows. Truly horrific stuff.

https://contexts.co/

Enjoy!

I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.

You're probably aware of this already, but if you command tab to an app you can use the up and down cursor keys to display all open windows for that app. You can also use command+` to cycle through open windows of the focused app.

I had forgotten about this, it's a bit fiddly but absolutely worth mentioning.

Why there isn't just an option to have cmd-tab show all windows is beyond me. As someone with sometimes several browser windows and often dozens of terminals open, this is just so painful.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ will do that for you.

As far as window management, tiling, etc., I use BetterSnapTool. No relation to the developer, just a user for many years.

https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool

I've been liking Magnet. I have an ultra wide monitor and being able to 3 vertical terminal windows all 1/3 screen in size is nice.

I've been using tiles for a while, it works pretty well

You can disable animations when switching between spaces. I use skhd for this to map the hotkeys to the Yabai command to switch spaces. Pressing f13 goes to the previous space immediately and f14 to the next space.

1. Install Yabai

2. install skhd

3. disable SIP (ugh): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

4. add `f13 : yabai -m space --focus prev` and `f14 : yabai -m space --focus next` to your `~/.skhdrc` file.

I've tried this and much more but there's still noticable delay compared to Linux' twms and it's not only about workspace switching. There's this huge thread on stackoverflow[1] which is a great illustration of what a mess macos display server is.

1 - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...

FWIW Monterey on a 13” M1 Pro felt incredibly tight compared to any model I’ve tried before.

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