Hacker News Reader

Cannot at all relate to this perspective. If you like PopOS, that’s great. But this nonsense about Mac fans being blinded by their love of the brand is the edgelord meme that will not die.

MacOS is fine. PopOS is fine. Windows is fine. They each ask you to adopt a UI paradigm because how could they not. It’s natural that transitioning between them is costly.

Every time I see comments like this I’m reminded of this great quote: “The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.”

> “The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.”

At least IBM took this to heart.

Hmm, I was using my ThinkPad with the wrong body part

>nonsense about Mac fans being blinded by their love of the brand is the edgelord meme that will not die.

Thank you for the completely unemotional comment that totally does not add to the notion I was alluding to that some fans are a bit sensitive about criticism.

Joking aside, our points are basically the same. I totally agree that nothing we create is intuitive "by definition"; that's my whole point. I would never claim that Linux or anything else is intuitive "by definition", and yet I see a lot of Mac fans claiming that. It might be perception bias, but I think not.

My first contact with a Mac was some 10 years ago. I struggled to turn it on -- contrary to _all other similar devices_, on the Mac the power button was very faintly beveled, and tucked in an invisible corner on the back of the screen (it was a desktop). I get that people might like this, totally fine. I just don't accept that this is intuitive design.

See, Mac users rarely turn the device off. It can stay on for months without issue. Laptops can sleep for weeks before they run out of power. The power button is more like a reset switch, and doesn't need to be front and center.

A lot of these first impressions are just that, first impressions, and can be quite different from feedback coming from daily users.

I read this comment and realized I don’t even remember the last time I powered down my Mac! You’re right that it’s not something I do very often. Is that not the case with Windows and Linux nowadays? What’s the point in powering down?

Software updates is one reason

For simpler userspace updates a restart of the relevant processes is easy enough, but it can be a bit more difficult when it comes to kernel updates.

(Updating a running kernel has been a thing in Linux for a number of years, but my systems don't do it.)

Software updates require a restart, but that's not what I'm thinking of when I consider a power down. I'm thinking of the scenario where you take explicit action to power down your machine and leave it powered down. I power down my machines before going on vacation, for example.

Even when you power down or restart a Mac it remembers all the applications you had running and all the application windows and it re-opens everything so you come back to everything just the way you left it.

What are people doing with their computers that a Mac is so stifling? I'm late to the Mac game, have been on it for about a decade, and was a 15-year Windows and Linux desktop user before that. Still, I don't even know what it might be.

Docker Desktop is relatively bad compared to native docker on Linux. If you spend your day doing that macOS is very stifling. Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

Ah—I've done a lot of Docker on Mac, but just with the command line tools, so I don't know how Docker Desktop is (on any platform).

> Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

The only keyboard customization I do is something that Mac makes at least as easy as Linux (use Caps Lock as an extra control) but I bet it is frustrating if you want to customize stuff outside the cases that they explicitly support remapping. That makes sense.

To run Docker on macOS you need Docker Desktop or any of the alternatives. The docker CLI is really slow compared to native, at least with Docker Desktop, and i Rancher Desktop failed installing.

The options for package management on macOS aren’t great in my experience, coming from using Linux on all my personal machines. Homebrew exists but it always feels bolted on and I’ve had things break in interesting ways using it. Nix might be better, I don’t have much experience using it on macOS.

Also, tiling window managers.

That's because most mac users fall to the well-crafted publicity of Homebrew, and remain ignorant about the better https://www.macports.org/ package management system. MacPorts was inspired by the FreeBSD Ports Collection, is created by Apple engineers, used by Apple internally, is unix-y and has more packages than Homebrew. (But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have).

I started as a MacPorts user, and moved because it managed to break itself about quarterly over the two years or so that I used it, usually in some way weird enough that it was easier to just remove all my packages (rm the whole directory) and start over than try to fix it. HomeBrew's done that zero times for me, in about eight years.

I've extensively used Portage (gentoo), rpm (Fedora, Mandrake), and dpkg/apt (Debian and Ubuntu), and MacPorts, plus put in a smaller amount of time with several others. HomeBrew is, overall, my favorite.

[EDIT] And this in particular:

> But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have

HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used. AFAIK only Arch and Portage even come close.

[EDIT]

Downvoted for countering someone's passive-aggressive insult ("people who don't like the software I do must be gullible morons, it can't be that they have good reasons") with my own, honest anecdote, in a respectful tone. I know, I know, don't complain about DVs, but man HN, sometimes....

I had exactly the opposite experience. Homebrew chewed up my computer a couple times back when it installed everything alongside OS files. The only sane way to get rid of it was to reinstall the OS.

> back when it installed everything alongside OS files.

Whoa—I don't recall it ever doing that. Some time before ~2012?

Not sure. It made the system binary folders user writable. It stopped doing that when Apple forced them by adding some extra security measures around /usr/bin.

Man, that blows. I find the current model (and only one I can remember? Maybe I did use it when it worked that way, and just didn't realize it) of keeping all user packages totally separate from the core system and just linking them in better and safer than what e.g. most Linux package managers do—now that I'm used to my package manager not really being able to mess up my base system, I wish all the rest worked that way, too :-/

Since the start Homebrew installed in /usr/local instead of a dedicated directory (which it now does); it literally always had a worse design than the earlier systems Fink and MacPorts. The only reason people used it is that it was written in Ruby and at the time there was a generation of new Rails developers that for some reason only wanted to use tools written in Ruby.

> HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used ...

Not that I doubt your claim but MacPorts has more packages than Homebrew:

Homebrew - around 6031 packages (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/)

MacPorts - 29,128 packages (https://ports.macports.org/)

(Ofcourse, more doesn't imply it has all the newer and / or popular packages or that Homebrew has the same packages as in MacPorts, which could explain your experience).

I second that. MacPorts is amazing and makes the Mac a very decent Unix environment.

If you are used to using gnu user land you’ll be using a utility like brew to install the gnu components. The bsd counterparts are just off enough to find something a bit off on most of them.

I really dislike finder. I’ve not found a sane replacement.

Updates for me took 10-15 minutes. Rebooting a few times. Relegated to answering slacks on phone during that time.

Office is also awful on the Mac. I wound up using office in a windows VM because a lot of stuff was broken opening complex documents.

My newest job I asked for a windows laptop. WSL2 is ok. I just run vscode connected to wsl and do my work there and use native office. Those two apps, postman, and chromium (chrome and slack) is really my stack and it works well enough. I would rather use Linux but our IT department have a big thumbs down since they have no clue what they are doing regarding securing that.

Microsoft Office has gotten better but it’s still bad on Macos. I think it’s by design.

I am not saying it will solve your problems, but I like PathFinder on the Mac. I use Directory Opus on Windows. They fulfill the same niche & need for me. I find Finder and Explorer to be anemic in terms of functionality.

I've used Windows, Linux, Mac extensively for decades and I also frankly have no idea. The other responses to you as of this writing seem to be nitpicking and not anything truly foundational to the user experience.

I had to start using mac for my current job as of last year and have no idea. once you learn about cmd-` and the weirdness with minimizing, and installed rectangle, i became as productive as I am on windows

finder to drive navigation to native desktop apps + a first class unix terminal nails my productivity needs. I ended up buying an m1 pro pretty soon after getting accustomed

Similar usage pattern here. MacOS desktop design is not perfect, but it's fine.

I could never have the majority of apps in full screen though, I switch apps far too often. My desktop is just a pile of windows on top of each other.

As a Linux user of 15 years now, i look forward to beeing challenged by using a Mac, since for me energy efficiency is more important than personal comfort.

How does energy efficiency matter here? Or rather, why are you implying that a Mac might be more energy efficient, and enough to matter? Geniuenly curious.

M1 coming secong at 10 watts shortly after a Ryzen at several times that? Check out the reviews on anandtech.

There is nothing inherent about having a bad window manager that makes it more power efficient; Apple could implement a better desktop environment and still have low power use.

You could also install a window manager such as rectangle or magnet if window management is a big deal for you. People switching OSs expect some things to roll over and then forget that they can google for potential solutions when things don’t work the way they expect/want.

I, like the author of this essay, was prevented from doing such things by my employer when I used a Mac for work.

I do also want to point out that such suggestions - "just install and configure [some software] which will solve your problem" - are generally rejected when I point them out to people who are having a hard time getting started with free desktops. The KDE or GNOME environment are expected to be perfect at installation, but Windows and Mac OS are afforded more leniency. It's a double standard.

Ryzen 5700 has 25W TDP https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-5700U-Processor-Be...

IMO a 15-watt difference is basically negligible in this context. It is so insignificant it can be offset by pretty much anything. You know creating aluminum uses a ton of energy; maybe that fancy aluminum case of the Macs used more power than a tiny TDP difference will ever save.

It came second to the desktop processors at 3-4x25W TDP.

I think they were talking about energy efficiency in terms of "how long battery lasts".

And 15-watts makes a big difference when you have a 60-watt-hour battery.

> In the overall multi-core scores, the Apple M1 is extremely impressive. On integer workloads, it still seems that AMD’s more recent Renoir-based designs beat the M1 in performance, but only in the integer workloads and at a notably higher TDP and power consumption.

Apple’s lead against Intel’s Tiger Lake SoC at 28W here is indisputable, and shows the reason as to why Apple chose to abandon their long-term silicon partner of 15 years. The M1 not only beats the best Intel has to offer in this market-segment, but does so at less power.

I also included multi-threaded scores of the M1 when ignoring the 4 efficiency cores of the system. Here although it’s an “8-core” design, the heterogeneous nature of the CPUs means that performance is lop-sided towards the big cores. That doesn’t mean that the efficiency cores are absolutely weak: Using them still increases total throughput by 20-33%, depending on the workload, favouring compute-heavy tasks.

Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency. Naturally, in higher power-level, higher-core count systems, the M1 can’t keep up to AMD and Intel designs, but that’s something Apple likely will want to address with subsequent designs in that category over the next 2 years.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

“You can get great hardware and battery life with system76 for instance.” The build quality of these two platforms is nowhere, and I mean nowhere close. Apples (heh) and oranges.

I’m rooting for system76, but they have a long way to go.

Absolutely agree. Build quality is meh, not even good. But the battery is seriously good. Like 10+ hours good.

Which model is that? My 2 year old System76 Galago Pro gets 1 hour of battery life.

This guy here: https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

>Up to 14 hours of battery life per charge

I routinely get over 10 hours.

10+ hours isn't 'seriously' good anymore. I routinely can get 18-20 hours on my M1 MacBook Pro.

Whilst that's true I dream of getting 10 hours battery life on my XPS 13 Dev Edition (9370).

I really miss all day usage that I had on my last Mac. If System76 can provide that again I think I could live with lower build quality.

they are cheap clevo laptops at a huge markup

I just spec'd out the System 76 Galago Pro to match that of the Clevo equivalent that's linked elsewhere in this thread (L143MU), and the System 76 came to $1032, while the Clevo is listed at €1,026.90 (or $1,116.89), so when you say "huge markup" it must be in reference to something else. That said, I don't have any real skin in this game.

They don’t pay retail. Perhaps they have a slightly less high of a markup than the OEM.

I have no idea whatsoever.

well to be fair, i did the same exercise before buying a system76 a few years back and the difference was a bit more even with oem consideration so thats good to know. the build quality is very cheapish feeling and it fell apart pretty quickly and i regretted not just getting a lenovo or xps or something but it was nice to support their efforts

I have not used any System76 laptop, but how is its build quality to a Thinkpad?

system76? sounds cool can it run excel and apple music?

I guess?

System76 makes laptops. They come with their own Linux distribution called PopOS.

System76 doesn’t make laptops they just resell the same Clevos a hundred other places do:

https://clevo-computer.com/en/laptops-configurator/purpose/b...

I believe the one value add they do provide is that they choose their components to work well with Linux and test to make sure that's the case.

Ah yes, apple music, the pinnacle of computing and benchmark by which to judge all professional-level personal computers.

I don't like what you like...

alright how about framer

anything with a browser can run apple music.

"Training wheels" is my favourite description of the macOS GUI!

I actually appreciate the simplicity. Being stuck on Windows for the past couple months I say the best analogy for its window management would be “square training wheels”. Or rectangular, as square ones would have a single cadence.