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Comment by diskzero | Hacker News Reader

You may be disappointed by my answer, but I have been a Mac user since 2001. Steve Jobs hired as many of the Eazel team members who wanted to come to Apple when the company closed. Many of us took the offer and other went to Android, Google, Red Hat and elsewhere. At Apple, I worked on Finder, Spotlight, Time Machine and other projects. Feel free to flame me about those. I'll accept some responsibility for the issues those projects have.

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I won't flame you over it, but I will say that if it wasn't for your later work, I wouldn't be using Linux on the desktop :p

All's well that ends well, I suppose!

Hah. Totally. I am no longer at Apple and free to improve other software. Just curious, what were some specific issues that caused your move?

There's a plethora of reasons, especially today. I used to do the whole "Windows for gaming, Mac for productivity" thing, but as time went on I started to really hate macOS. The first pet peeve of mine was Spotlight and it's file indexing, which would always melt my computer whenever I cloned repos or did anything outside of a blacklisted folder. Eventually I just disabled the file search altogether. Finder was also never my favorite file manager, but a lot of the reasons really just boiled down to HFS and APFS being really annoying to use, and Apple's own idea of how files/folders should behave. I never quite understood it, and Finder never felt like it helped me make sense of all the "magic".

Unrelated to your work (of course, nothing personal though), I really started to hate the time I spent developing on Mac. Deploying to Linux machines while running a decades-old FreeBSD amalgam kernel was an unbelievable pain in the ass, and I wound up spending more of my time fixing Mac stuff than actually developing software. The lack of a package manager burned me up too, since both Macports and Homebrew had their own issues that simply wasted too much of my time. About 3 years ago I pulled the trigger and switched my main machine to Linux, and I've never looked back since. Seeing that Apple is ditching x86 now, it looks like I made the right call (at least as a developer). Simply put, I spent too much time trying to make MacOS behave like Linux, and I was tired of constantly losing control/options.

The worst thing for me is slow docker performance. Not usually an issue on my work MacBook since I tend to do stuff on remote build servers, but it can be really annoying to spin up projects on MacOS without polluting your OS with all the dependencies.

There’s not really much way around this since Linux puts syscall traps in every binary rather than routing through a libsyscall.so that contains the traps. (If the latter were the case, a container could provide an alternate library to do syscall interception much more easily on non-Linux platforms.)

Wow that's an impressive portfolio! I don't know why exactly, but I really like time machine. I'm not sure if it's a usually disliked piece of software, but at least for me it makes back ups so much easier. Especially for my girlfriend who is not very technical.

Thank you for your work!

I recently had to switch to Mac for the first time for work and knowing you worked on both Nautilus and Finder I'm shocked that my favorite features from Nautilus are nowhere to be found in Finder:

Right click in Folder > Open Terminal

Right click in Folder > New File

Thanks anyway though for your work :)

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