Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)
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Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about).
I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of trouble with everything else.
I could not get a mouse setup that worked (I'm strictly no acceleration, and macOS's acceleration was literally making my arm ache).
I switched because I stopped being a fulltime developer, my main machine was getting old (6 years), and macOS has good MS Office support.
Overall I'd say I'm about 70% efficient vs on Linux, a bit less so when in active development. The mobility makes up for it, and efficiency just isn't as important to my day-to-day for now.
Many of my gripes are listed elsewhere, but things like middle-click paste is something that is easy to write off but was actually a gigantic part of my process. Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app?
I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers!
I'll leave this final tidbit though:
On Linux:
* Open Spotify
* Press play button on keyboard
* Spotify plays
On Mac:
* Open Spotify
* Press play button on keyboard
* Apple Music opens ??????
Works on my M1 Max well enough to be satisfied with my mouse in SC2.
Yes I have noticed this too! I love my MacBook, but the idea that I would pay what, $20, for the top tier window snapping app is completely ridiculous. That’s something that should be built in to the shell!
Use https://www.spectacleapp.com/ - it's free.
It's not exactly the same, but better in many ways - excepting the auto-drag snapping. Snapping is via key combination instead.
Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.
Oh yeah I just plugged a mouse into a work Mac recently and was super confused at this. Yes I’ve gotten used to natural scrolling on touchpads by now, but no that doesn’t mean I want it on a scroll wheel!
It does just work. You're just using it wrong.
Keep that second sentence in mind whenever people say that first line and you'll never have any issues with apple fans
I'd hesitate to lump all apple fans around the few vocal ones. The vast majority of people that like apple don't push a cult of "it just works". Most people I know just recognize a computer as a computer, not an identity.
I gave up on fanboyism years ago and nowadays I've found I like almost every platform for different reasons.
Some folks love to fiddle with settings and tweak configs to get everything just right... but this is a recipe for disappointment when an upgrade removes the secret config you found or hard-codes a setting that was previously available as a preference.
I spent untold hours on Mac trying to recreate my Linux environment, and after cobbling together a number of different tools (some paid, some not) I got it pretty close - and then a new version of the OS came out and broke everything. It took a few months before most of the tools I used were updated, and due to accessibility API changes some of them never did get updated.
Don't mess with users' muscle memories for your design for literally no gain. That's bad design.
I use a Logitech G502 and I just like the high sensitivity. I don't need a huge trackpad or to pick up the mouse. When mouse movent maps 1:1 to pointer movement, your brain and muscle memory can do a much better job at fast & precise movement.
The Apple m1 is an SoC, not a CPU. It is not comparable to an AMD 3950X. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about the display capabilities of an SoC, because the GPU and display controllers are built into the SoC.
Apple themselves markets the macbook air as supporting:
> One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz[1]
And yes, I'm aware of the display link hacks. This works by emulating extra GPUs in software (VGC). The m1 supports multiple displays via display link in the same way MacOs runs Gnome via an Ubuntu VM.
You mentioned the M1, which is an SoC, not a computer. So when you said the M1 only supports one external monitor, you were being vague and incorrect. The M1 Mac Air only supports one monitor, but the M1 Mac mini supports two. If you expand the M1 SoC to encompass both the Pro, Max and Ultra versions, you can connect 3, 4, and 5 displays respectively.
14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro: Two external displays at up to 6K over USB-C and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0
14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max: Three external displays at up to 6K over USB-C and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0
Mac Studio with M1 Max or M1 Ultra: Four displays at up to 6K over USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 and and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0
https://www.macworld.com/article/347919/how-many-monitors-ca...
Some of us who grew up playing these games got used to using Windows with no mouse acceleration. This is because it is easier to build muscle memory without it, since a certain distance traveled with the mouse will always produce the same camera movement in game regardless of how fast the mouse was moved.
How we deal with it? I think there are three factors, at least in my case;
1: Mouse sensitivity. I run my mouse at 1600 DPI, which is 2-4x higher than your typical typical cheap office mouse. I can zip across a large display pretty quick.
2: Fine motor skills. Years of Quake and other fast paced shooters have elevated my mouse accuracy above that of your typical computer user, allowing me to function on the desktop at a high mouse sensitivity.
3: On-the-fly DPI adjustments. My mouse has buttons for cycling through a number of sensitivity presets. I set mine to have 400, 800, and 1600 DPI. When something requires high mouse precision (such as photo editing) I turn the sensitivity down.
I run my mouse at like 17000 DPI, then lower the sensitivity to compensate.
This gives me sub-pixel precision in FPS games.
Not that it helps much. I still have shit reaction times.
Ahh, very interesting and very cool. That's the explanation I was looking for! Didn't realize mice had this feature or that OSes supported it.
I don't understand how this is even a question. It's such an obvious answer.
My sensitivity is configured so that it takes about an inch and a half of mouse movement to move across one monitor.
EDIT: babypuncher's reply seems to address this using on-the-fly DPI adjustment. Pretty cool!
Growing up playing first person shooters has wired my mind to a degree that it's difficult to overcome the muscle memory. This makes mouse acceleration terribly frustrating. Fortunately, using a track pad with mouse acceleration doesn't use the same muscles and is much more bearable (if slower) to use.
It does (generally) just work! However, it works they way they want you to use it.
That's fine for me and I usually am happy to adapt. It doesn't mean infinitely configurable.
They changed their lineup to 6 jams and sales went thru the roofff
When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen.
But the scroll settings is much more annoying than that. Apple provides two completely independent settings for "Mouse" and "Trackpad". Under each, there is a toggle for scroll direction. If you toggle one, it magically and silently toggles the other as well.
That's not "simple", that's not "easy to use", that's 100% bad UX. If there's only one global setting, why present it as two independent options which are magically linked?
I‘m more and more convinced that the Apple way is the right way for the vast majority of users and deeper customization should only be available through the CLI or extensions.
And yet… desktop Linux isn’t widely popular.
I’m pointing out how this is like that.
This is possible, but never as easy as it sounds when written down like that. Even when advanced settings are tucked away out of sight from regular users, at the kind of scale OS X or iOS operates in (or Linux, for that matter), there will be a non-negligible number of people who by accident or intent fool around with the advanced settings and get themselves into a state from which they lack the expertise to extricate themselves.
This is why Apple layer their own UX on top of Bluetooth, for example. And why many settings have no UX, you have to know the magic incantation to use in Terminal.
Again, I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that "Making a boat for passengers AND for sailors" is a hard problem.
Don't get me wrong, I run ubuntu on a home fileserver/nas box but when I need it for some scientific computing package or something, the best way to run it is on top of Mac OS in a VM....
Are there links to this acceleration? Thanks.
CursorSense to customise the acceleration graph (or disable).
SensibleSideButtons so you can use mouse4/5 in the browser.
ScrollReverser so scrolling on mouse and touchpad both make sense.
Rectangle for window snapping.
This. I get the M1 must be very good but what I really want is something I doubt I'm going to get: native Office support in Linux. I use Office rarely but on those rare occasions it sucks to use Office 365.
> * Open Spotify
> * Press play button on keyboard
> * Apple Music opens ??????
I just tried these steps. Spotify plays.
[0] https://github.com/beardedspice/beardedspice || brew install —cask beardedspice
I find this is often the case with MacOS, sometimes with open alternatives available.
I wanted windows/linux like window snapping and found a free solution called Rectangle[0], but discovered however they do it was causing mouse lag in games. Apple dev friend investigated into it with logs from my machine and discovered they are "just not doing it properly, go buy bettersnaptool[1]"
Sure enough I go spend $8 on bettersnaptool and all my mouse lag is gone and I've got the tweakable window snapping I crave.
This is often the case it just depends if the open software solution is done "properly" or will have some small bug that may or may not bother you. Rectangle worked flawlessly in every other instance except once I would launch a game, the mouse lag was not present on desktop applications.
[0] https://rectangleapp.com/ [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=...
Do you trust Apple's app review
But in general, yes, I trust apps from the App Store. I haven’t had a reason not to.
Like three finger (middle click) on the touchpad ... Apple just can't do it ... Linux sorted it for multiple manufacture's touchpads years ago.
I’m not certain but I think if you turn it off, bettertouchtool would let you make it do something (anything!) else you wanted.
Edit: I think I misread your “Apple cant do it” meaning physically, while you probably meant exposing a setting without using (paid) third party apps
Maybe I should have bugged my dev friend who did the digging to submit a bug report, but I didn't think of that at the time.
Rectangle has a simple bug report template, and maintainers would probably guide you if you'd have trouble providing the requested information.
macOS version:
Rectangle version:
Logs if applicable (In Rectangle menu, hold option, "View Logging..."):
Paying $8 is also valid, but I wouldn’t complain about it. It’s just the cost you choose to pay to get what you want.
That’s just the traditional way in which the Apple ecosystem works. They provide you with a pretty phenomenal starting point and App developers fill in the gaps.
Base macOS with Amphetamine, Magnet, and perhaps some utility for file/network access provide you with a desktop experience that comes close to the productivity of a tiling window manager, but certainly meets or exceeds the features built into Windows 10 or KDE for window management. Plus you can use AppleScript if you really want to get creative with desktop management.
It also transmits your hardware serial to Apple when you use it.
Both fully available off the App store. I'm sure you can find alternatives for most apps away from the App store.
Modern Macs literally have a one-touch "send my supercookie to the manufacturer" button.
* Press cmd + option + S
* Press space bar
* Spotify opens and plays
or
* Press cmd + option + spacebar (opens terminal)
* `sp` (my spotify cli alias)
* Spotify opens and plays
Custom hot keys are easy in MacOS settings menu. Even easier is the free app Hotkey! https://codenuts.de/en/posts/hotkey/
It's like making TVs you can install arbitrary applications on, but shipping them with remotes with branded buttons to open one or two specific preinstalled applications.
I use this feature all the time. Unfortunately, lately there seems to be a goblin in my system that's occasionally going in and deleting App Shortcuts for a specific app and I have to re-create them. Any ideas? I was thinking the app was getting updated or something like that so Mac forgets the settings.
The only thing I wasn't familiar with is MTP, which is apparently a Windows-specific protocol that Microsoft forced into the USB standard in later versions, and as far as I know across decades of using Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS across multiple computers on the same network with shared peripherals I've never even used this protocol.
What's the complaint again?
OS choice is mostly a personal preference. As far as I am personally concerned, FreeBSD is the best OS possible to use, and macOS is second best. But I don't write blog posts telling people that their preference is incapable of doing things my preference is capable of doing, and if I were to do so, I'd at least do my research first to make sure it was correct.
If you like something, awesome! But making something else look bad because you didn’t like it does not make your thing any better.
I've given a lot of thought to ssh/sftp mount points (for obvious reasons) and the standard recipe (and support answer) at rsync.net has been FUSE/sshfs.
I've even written a handful of scripts and one-liners to support my personal use of sshfs on my own machines, etc.
But lately ... I've just switched to using "Mountain Duck" which does everything I want and is quick and easy and slick and professional.
I forget what the license cost is, but it's worth it. The "official" FUSE for OSX and sshfs packages were getting old and came from odd sources (sshfs for mac is from 2014) and I don't think you can 'brew install' them, etc.
Mountain Duck.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend using sshfs on Mac. I used it for about a year, and about 90% of the time it worked great. The rest of the time it would hang, just not sync, not let me write files, etc. and every couple of weeks it would break so badly that a restart was the only fix, usually at the most inopportune times.
I ended up just grabbing an old external hard drive and installing syncthing. The remote server still has all the RAID and backups and whatnot, but now I basically have a local cache on the old hard drive, so it works consistently and is fast. If it breaks, oh well, I'll get another one and sync it again.
In the version I was using, mount-readonly yes, mount-readwrite no. Had to install Mounty for readwrite.
> Mount an SSH or NFS drive
I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer.
As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this.
Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.
Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?
Comparing a stock Mac OS to a Linux distribution with packages installed is pretty shady.
I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.
There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.
This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS.
MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default.
That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…
This comes from [1] which is an interesting page.
It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately).
Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither.
Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.
You can mount an iPhone as MTP. But only for pictures, not for music.
I kinda get why, but blah. It’s a bit of a weird distinction to me.
[1] https://www.usb.org/document-library/media-transfer-protocol...
SSH mounts are done with osxfuse
MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp
This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.
This seems like a reasonable complaint.
Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?
I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.
Ubuntu linux is a distribution, and only a very very small set of tools and functionalities is "Ubuntu", all the others are simply packaged up 3rd party tools
It's a big strength of Linux distributions. There is one central, easily reachable place where you can report and track bugs for pretty much everything you do on the computer.
Obviously there are no guarantees that things will be fixed (fast) if you don't pay some sort of support but that's fair enough and still, the maintainers usually want the stuff they package to work reasonably well (they wouldn't spend their time packaging it otherwise) so one can expect a minimum level of functionality for most things unless explicitly stated otherwise.
The supported area for Windows and macOS from Microsoft and Apple is small in comparison to BSD and GNU/Linux distributions and good luck reaching them anyway.
It's reasonable to have unfixed bugs for years if they are not really blocking many people (and even if they did, but that would be too bad). Maintainers are focusing on other things that need to be done (or not, anyway nobody is supposed to fix bugs for free if they don't want to).
In this case, launchpad works as intended, as a place were you can track the (non) progression of your bugs.
Me too, probably, by the way (in other projects). My bugs reports are more like FYIs to the community.
It's almost ;) as if Apple doesn't care if real UNIX people prefer their laptops anymore.
Apple has moved on, to a bigger and far less demanding market: "real" people who have never heard of the artist formerly known as UNIX.
I don't think any are. From a quick glance, everything should be included in Ubuntu's officially supported "main" section.
In my case I use sshfs, which also uses FUSE and is a "3rd party tool". Is that more reasonable than osxfuse? (Honest question, I'm unfamiliar with the latter)
edit:
sshfs is "unsupported": "However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker)."
Apparently this supports a bunch of other "virtual filesystems", like Google Drive, as well.
Since it's part of Gnome, I guess it's fair to compare this with MacOS and consider it "woking out of the box".
Only thing app that wasn't working well with gvfs was libreoffice. I don't know if it is still the case but it refused to handle a file gvfs mounted on my NAS regardless of the protocol (ssh, smb, nfs).
You’d have to install macFUSE binary from their official site first, and load their kernel extension via the GUI, before running the Homebrew command to solve it.
Which begs the question: if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?
Jumping through hoops? It's installing a pkg file, takes about a minute and it is a one time operation you will never really need to do again.
Have you ever daily driven a linux box? Times have changed but you will jump through hoops far more often than on macOS.
- written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro
Typically I have to do it once a year, because the kernel extension seems to break with every new macOS version.
> - written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro
That depends entirely on what you're doing, what software and hardware you're using.
Any Linux distro on a MacBook (unless it's an old model)? Yeah, lots of hoops.
For about 25 years. Hard to agree.
I daily drive macOS, Debian, and Windows (for personal & work purposes) - the same can be said for Linux (auto mounting a WebDAV share on boot), but at least:
- Linux’s documentation is much more comprehensive than Apple
- whatever you do on Linux some guy from 2003 would have already done so, whereas going from Catalina to Big Sur would’ve seen some big process changes and deprecations
- Intel vs M1 compatibility concerns galore, the only times I need to worry about that on Linux is when I run VMs and LXCs on Proxmox.
Ah, sure, but that was pre-systemd. Or maybe the solution was for XFree86 and now I'm on Wayland... Or an interesting incantation of ifconfig, which might not even be installed by default?
oh... oh you poor soul :P
I used to use Arch on a high end gaming laptop when I was younger and had time to waste on things like dotfiles and perfecting my vim config and jumping through hoops like Bonus level Sonic.
Now I opt for lovely simple boring functional Dell laptops from my employer and install Fedora on everything.
Out of Windows OSX and Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora/Sabayon (Gentoo variant), Fedora wins the "everything just works" thing by miles on the supported Dell HW and _still_ supports stuff better out of the box with my home desktop.
Yeah yeah I know everyone's experience is different, but...... Out of using all of the operating systems on the daily for 15 years, linux is the one I consistently begrudge the least.
I am a software engineer, but I work in user space and have zero interest in managing hardware issues. When I plug in a device to a Mac or Windows box it just works 95% of the time or more. I never have to touch textual config files, I never have to adjust DNS settings and routing settings to work with the VPN, when I plug in my headphones it plays audio through them, and my webcam works nicely. I don’t have to use the terminal to get my GPU to kick in at appropriate times.
I have tried to make the switch to Linux so many times, I love the computational model, but I’m too busy to spend my time working out the user experience, and too cheap to use a Mac now that WSL2 gives me a real Unix environment on Windows.
“Cheap, User Friendly, or Dev friendly, pick two” Was my mantra before WSL2 made windows dev friendly too… I’m not a fan boy for Windows, just too lazy to care anymore. I’d be happy to try Fedora…but I have my doubts…
I quit using Macs a long time ago because I find I have to spend way too much time configuring them and adapting to the workflow, but between Windows and Linux I find devices work pretty much the same. If anything Linux has a better success rate, things "just work." On Windows it seems like every single time I plug in a mouse Windows starts "installing drivers." Even though it has the drivers. Usually "installing drivers" seems like it's a nothing but sometimes it actually seems to be downloading things and installing them while the PnP mouse already should work.
Definitely, as a rule plugging things into Windows it can take 10-15 seconds to pick up while Linux works much faster on average.
Agreed - again, from someone who has given a lot of thought to sshfs and mounting ssh/sftp on OSX.
See my reply to a sibling-of-your-parent, upthread: use Mountain Duck.
You can always disable SIP and load unsigned kernel extensions, if they refuse to sign.
If you’re a power user, you’ve probably already disabled SIP.
A couple of releases ago files like /etc/hosts and /etc/sudoers were protected by SIP. That’s not the case anymore, though.
And if you’re deliberately installing unsigned drivers, the assumption should be that you (should) know what you’re doing. So disabling Secure Boot/SIP as a prerequisite for that is fine.
Or are you suggesting that everyone should be able to install unsigned drivers with 2 clicks? Because I’m not convinced that it’s a good idea.
Actually I am ("signing" with one CA only is mostly security theater and market control), but that's besides the point. The point being that macfuse will quickly become even more of a pain to install and use, making it more useless and not recommendable to end users.
Please don't go around another time and now claim "but you can disable SIP!" while at the same time claiming "but end users should not disable SIP!". We are effectively an end user here. If you "need to know what you are doing" to install macfuse then no one is going to install it.
It's exactly the same as with Secure Boot. No one wants the Scary Boot Prompts. No one wants the Scary Desktop Watermark. Your users will blame your product and avoid it.
If you could just whitelist one extra signature, then maybe there'd be something to discuss. But you can't.
..and MacOS lets you mount an nfs share ootb as a user. On linux you need an fstab entry for that though that is really not an issue at all.
How you ask? You do this with the mac specific command: mount_nfs Here is how I use it to mount shares from my NAS. $ mount_nfs -o nolocks,nfsvers=3 /home/nas/myshares/nfs /Users/bob/nas/nfs
mount -t nfs ...
It's not that there are no solutions, it's that the author and as a matter of fact I too resent that we have to look for solutions.
From my point of view when I plug my phone in my linux box it just works but when I plug it in my Mac nothing happens, thus MacOs is an inferior operating system. As in it fails to operate in the manner I would like it to.
Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.
I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.
On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...
MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%.
Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately).
82,719 responses on the operating system question too...
(I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)
I think a lot of this will happen under the goal of unifying the laptop and phone/tablet experience.
Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.
I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.
(2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
(2) Many people really only use any computer as a consumption device, but the general ding of iOS as "read only" has always rung hollow to me. A large number of people work primarily with text -- emails, posts, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. An iPad with a keyboard is a GREAT tool for them, and that's not a "read only" use case.
As an aside, when I last updated my camera kit I added an iPad Pro to use for photo processing and culling when traveling instead of a laptop. It's actually GREAT for that, too, but this level of power is relatively new to the platform.
I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.
With Linux it's not only that I could change everything (system font, acceleration of the mouse pointer etc), but I literally HAD to do it. First days after buying new laptop and installing Linux I had to spend of configuring everything – from mouse pointers to Google calendar integration, often with obscure command line or config setups.
That was fun.
Until I bought first Macbook Air and discovered that I don't need to reconfigure everything anymore. Touchpad had just perfect speed/acceleration of the pointer. Mail/calendar/contacts was syncing out of the box. Fonts were awesome. Screens and external montiors just worked. Wifi just worked. Hybernation/sleep just worked.
So this is true on Linux you can configure way more than on MacOS. But the reason behind it is what keeping me with Macbooks all these years.
I watch other folks spend hours and days tweaking up a new machine. For me, I could swap out my Mac in less than an hour and likely have an identical user experience. That to me has more value than hyper levels of control.
Hardware wise, things are a bit mixed. I'm writing this from an LG gram that runs perfectly out of the box- screen, wifi, sleep, everything Just Works. The battery life is fantastic.
The only real configuration that I've done is the same configuration I would do on a mac anyway via karabiner / hammerspoon.
Desktop linux has come a long way since the Corel or Mandrake Linux days.
I use it in my PC nowadays and it's ok. I think the current iteration of the nonworking hardware (before it was soundcard/winmodem/bluetooth/graphics) are Laptop technologies like multi monitor with right resolution or fingerprint scanning.
Linux has always had problems with hardware though (not your fault, but still your problem).
So much this. I realized I want to use my computer as a tool to perform work and consume entertainment, and not as a hobby in and of itself.
I used Debian sid for about a decade and later switched to Ubuntu for a few years before biting the bullet and buying a Mac around OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I'm extremely thankful for my Linux years, as I gained now-invaluable information about low-level system issues that I use nearly every day at my job. But I don't think I'll ever use it as a desktop operating system again.
Time hasn't stood still. Both Windows and Linux have improved tremendously.
I switched to Mac around 2009 and have regularly gone back to Linux. It’s just not appropriate for a workhorse machine that you don’t want to have technical problems with, sadly.
I have a friend who loves Linux, has used it and nothing else since the 90s, and he said he would still never recommend it for anyone but a tinkering hacker.
Linux machines are great for dev, but terrible for any kind of management, and the UX generally sucks. I love Linux but it is not the right tool for the job unless your job is pure dev or you enjoy tinkering. Mac remains the best compromise, but it is a major compromise.
I would like to see more of posts like this for all Desktop environments. Like things you can do in MacOS but not in default Ubuntu setup.
I think the larger point is: in Linux, some things are complicated but most things are possible. On Mac and Windows, some things are easier but many things are impossible.
So there's definitely a tradeoff. But since I have to use this tool for the majority of my waking hours in order to make a living, the ROI from taking a bit longer to solve an issue and then having it solved virtually forever makes Linux a better proposition IMHO.
I'd argue we could have both if not for commercial reasons. Apple deliberately chooses to limit control, Microsoft too.
With all the resources they have, you really think they couldn't give you more control without sacrificing stability?
There isn't infinite time and money in the world. Every hour making one feature more stable means an hour not invested in another. Flexibility and control are just additional features. If you want to change the system font, you have to test (and support) a much wider array of things, especially if your UI guidelines are as restrictive as Apple's. Every piece of control you expose to the user increases the engineering cost of writing and maintaining the software.
And frankly, if more people wanted that level of control, this year TRULY would be the year of linux on the desktop. But they don't.
Control is deliberately withdrawn to preserve the commercial interests of the producer, not because it is technically impossible to add it to stability.
You want stability? Provide a perfect default configuration. You want control? Allow tweaking that configuration in detail for users that are willing to do it.
The obvious caveat is that many things are impossible out of the box. There are plenty of tools available to address a good number of the shortcomings mentioned in the story.
That absolutely true but I feel like we all already knew it.
The lack of snapping/tiling at this point is just a deliberately malicious decision. I can't fathom why they will not implement some version of this better than that half-hearted split screen view that requires a separate virtual desktop.
Like he wants to move the clock. Oh my god just leave it where it is and get on with your job. Lack of customisability gives us more stable software.
And he wants his windows to wobble? What on earth is the point of that?
Computers should be made to serve people, not the other way around.
I'm not sure there can really be any reasonable requirement to move the clock. I think that's just being fussy.
For every wacky feature or option someone wants, that has to be built, maintained, tested. Every boolean option you add doubles the state space of the application!!
Less is more. This blog post is a set of requirements for a Homer car, not a sensible professional tool.
Sensible defaults are great, but after spending most of your day glued to a screen, you start noticing little improvements to your workflow. e.g. i dont want to turn my head all the way to the right to look at the clock (using external monitors)
Thats not a big change, but I believe the sum of all those little changes add up
> This blog post is a set of requirements for a Homer car, not a sensible professional tool
"Professional" is a wide category for sure, but I would argue professionals are the ones who need more customization, not less. They are the ones with esoteric tools and workflows, and where customizing their environment to match how their mind works allows them to focus on the problems at hand and not their tools.
> For every wacky feature or option someone wants, that has to be built, maintained, tested
True. However, these are trillion-dollar companies. Look at all the options for cars, or refrigerators, or whatever. And all these have the constraints of the physical world. And all made by companies with a heck of a lot less cash than Apple and Microsoft.
I'm saying he'd get more out the tool by learning and embracing the design of it, rather than wishing it was something that it isn't. Go with the flow, rather than fighting it. Reduce entropy not create it.
I was recently playing the remastered Dark Souls on Switch. For some reason, they used the Japanese button mapping of B and A rather than the usual mapping in the US. And you couldn't change it.
I mean, no big deal, I can learn the new mapping. And I mostly did. But even after 50-100 hours, I would still occasionally press the wrong button (accepting rather than cancelling). The previous configuration was so ingrained in me that I could not overcome my muscle memory without conscious thought.
So even when I really try to "go with the flow" there is friction. People come from different backgrounds, using different software and different paradigms, and it's not really easy at all to remap their way of thinking, even if they want to.
You're asking "but why not let the tail wag the dog?"
The tool works or it does not.
That's the point. macOS works just fine without wobbly windows. We don't need the extra complexity of wobbly windows.
Decades ago a Linux window manager drawing engine added wobbly windows just to show off that with their new system was trivial not because anyone needed it or wanted it! This is the kind of software and attitude I love and want to see everywhere! Doing something so well that the cost of a "luxury" feature drops to almost zeros and you just add it to show off in some free time :) Unfortunately not all of Linux is build like this and most of its parts are not really compatible with each other so they need to be forcibly ducktaped together by layers of glue code to resemble a full system, but that's a different story...
There's different ways to think about software and do software than our hellish local maximum we're stuck in... you're just going full "stockholm syndrome" and justifying the badly designed an non-extensible non-generalizable systems we're stuck with because doing things differently would've generated 5% less profit in the last quarter :)
No, it doesn't. We seem to have forgotten that there are more general ways to think about software and engineering and math and the world.
You can just design a system that is guaranteed to work fine:
- regardless of where widget X is positioned
- regardless of what font and font size (from an interval) and color is selected by the user for a certain UI components
- ...and you can have all UI on all apps on the whole computer be customizable in the same way without having to write any (zero!) extra lines of code by just inheriting functionality for some common components
- etc.
You don't have to just dumbly test all scenarios to guarantee sane global behaviors of systems.
And you don't get the burden of maintaining the "test cases for all possible scenarios" because you just don't write those tests in the beginning, they are useless in a well behaved system that follows LAWS and properly preserves INVARIANTS and just burn money through their tests-maintainance costs! (Like lots/some of pre-web systems actually were!)
We've now built for ourselves a crazy computing world where there are no longer stable (across years and decades) contracts, laws and invariants in software, so we have to defensively code and over-test everything! We could've had-the-cake-and-eaten-it too if we would've just put the effort of building more solid software foundations for ourselves, but instead we're torturing ourselves building Electron web apps on desktops in languages with lacking or handicaped type systems and run them on operating systems that offer no sane components with contractually guaranteed interfaces...
</rant>
...imagine if physics worked like that, you'd have to re-test the laws of physics every time you wanted to build a house because the laws could vary by neighbourhood and not even basic invariants like the conservation of energy were guaranteed to hold. Oh, you can't just ask for more than a 1-room rectangular uncostumizable house of standard size, because properly testing anything else doesn't crash on you in our universe with non-uniform physics is just too expensive! Just get used with you sensible defaults citizen, stop questioning the party and the world!
This does seem to be the basic philosophy Apple has adopted for its devices. Which is why I don't use them. I don't like their defaults (which means the whole concept of "sensible defaults" doesn't really make sense except in reference to some particular set of users, and there are many such sets with different preferences), I like being able to customize things (because my idea of how I want to work is never the same as some designer's idea), and I'm going to be doing things that the OS designer didn't think of (particularly since I'm a developer). In short, my experience with Apple devices is that they don't let me work the way I want to work. So I don't work with them.
Deciding that the platform that doesn't meet your needs is somehow illegitimate, "not a computer," or somehow morally unacceptable is juvenile fanboy crap.
Truth be told, a Macbook does expose itself as a general computing device all right.
But I would expect a mature desktop operating system to have improved window management capabilities in 2022
Apple may leave “wobbly windows” or even window manager behaviour as the kind of thing a third-party could add. They might do this because they want software companies to be able to make money making software for the Mac. A rich community of software providers is good for a platform.
As a user, this means that high quality software is more likely to be available for the Mac than it is for Linux. Companies struggle to make money on Linux and so fewer companies try. Microsoft used to get roundly criticized for adding stuff into Windows for free that third-parties could be selling for money instead. In fact, Microsoft was branded as “evil” by many for including a web browser for free shortly after Netscape had biggest IPO in history selling theirs for money.
I prefer the “everything in my distribution” model myself but calling an OS a “toy” because it does not bundle a utility or functionality that is hardly universal in utility or preference does not resonate with me.
Not being able to run the software I need for work is a more legitimate beef. I love Linux and I can use it for almost anything. I have to admit though that even just using it for my work email or calendar is a far inferior experience to either Mac or Windows.
For most people, an article about how Linux is still a toy because it poorly integrates with iMessage or Face Time may even make more sense than complaints about NFS.
I do not like macOS as much as I used to but there is a lot bundled into it. Even simple apps like Preview work a lot nicer than what I have on Linux. The Linux printing subsystem ( CUPS ) is a gift from Apple.
Again, I like Linux more than Mac these days. I am thinking of putting Garuda Linux on my MacBook Pro later today in fact. That said, this article did not hit with me.
Monkey brain sees shiny things. Monkey brain releases dopamine. Monke brain happy.
To have wobbly windows.
Maybe I don't want to see the clock whenever I look at notifications, or vice versa, because that's extremely distracting. Lack of customisability gives us less accessible software. Apple is really good at accessibility, but at the same time really bad.
> And he wants his windows to wobble?
Some people are fun at parties, some are not.
The alignment, it don't even support snapping, place two windows side by side properly is just like impossible, and the + on window go fullscreen unless you hold opt.
You can't just swipe to switch between window. You can only swipe between desktop.
I'd wonder which part in mac's window manager actually works well (compares to other desktop manager)?
macOS has supported automatic snapping while dragging windows for years now. Just drag it slowly when you're approaching the edge of the other window and the window you're dragging will snap to it
Like macOS by default might not be exactly fitting for everyone, but surely it works well enough for 99.999% of the population.
And coming from Linux users who love customizability... I mean there are multiple ways to make it work exactly as you want. I have snapping, and multiple gestures to position and resize exactly to my liking, through BetterTouchTool. And I am a very light user.
The window experience is really scuffed on mac compares to the fullscreen/desktop workflow (and apple even decides to swap maximize with go fullscreen because they expect you to use it so you need hold opt if you want to maximize.)
I highly doubt where the 99.999% comes given apple itself don't really recommend it.
Not sure I follow what you mean by Apple not recommending it. Recommending what?
It's like me saying Windows is broken because I have to install an app to use SSH, or because I can't just go to internet explorer and type vnc://.
> Like he wants to move the clock. Oh my god just leave it where it is
> and get on with your job.
This is impossible out of the box, and maybe possible depending on what third-party tools I hack together. IIRC command-dragging used to work on the clock, but either it never did and I'm misremembering, or the clock and the iOS-replica Quick Settings panel are special and exempt.
> I'm amazed that people don't just use the software as it's designed.
I can't understand the mindset that makes that kind of company behavior acceptable or the tradeoff worth it.
EDIT: I've hit my comment quota, here's my response: You don't need OSX for that, just their headers and libraries. People have built the build chain for Linux but it's useless without those and they cannot be redistributed.
(Homebrew started on Mac OS X)
It's essentially the same issue with iPhone v.s. Android. There's always some Android phone that can do one thing better than the best iPhone out there and to have an overall better-than-iPhone experience you need to use a dozen Android devices all the time(buying and maintaining multiple devices is unrealistic for most of the people, you need to be really rich and have a PA to manage all that for your. Another PA for the extra hours).
Notice how OP complains about not being able to change the default font and text size? Well, he is technically right but the thing is that Apple has already addressed the reason behind changing fonts by designing a UI that works well with all kind of resolutions. You don't have instances of extremely large or extremely small text or buttons, for example. It's all polished very well so there's no reason for someone to need to tune font size or font face. Sure, some people have visual impairments or use their computers differently therefore they can choose a "UI zoom level" instead of resolution and font sizes.
This works very well for most people and that's why most people are very happy with their device. For people who don't find this behaviour useful for them, there's Ubuntu, Windows, ChromeOS etc.
I see a lot of Android screenshots with barely legible fonts as system font. Some things are better when left to professionals and for those who disagree, there's Android of course.
What kind of experience are we talking about?
The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible.
I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.
You say that like there aren't always recommendations for GNOME extensions to install to make it act like it isn't a tablet.
- Edit $PATH for IDEs launched from the Mac GUI (to add MacPorts/Homebrew-installed Ninja to Qt Creator's binary search $PATH). ~/.profile isn't evaluated at login time (only in terminals), /etc/paths doesn't work (forgot if it affected terminals, definitely doesn't affect GUI apps), and `launchctl setenv PATH` didn't work in my testing.
- Install libraries like SDL systemwide in paths searched by default by build systems and runtimes, like on Linux. MacPorts installs to /opt/local, Homebrew on M1 installs to /opt/homebrew, neither of which is searched by build systems. I might try setting up developer environments using Nix at some point, but I haven't learned how to use Nix/nix-darwin beyond editing the set of global apps.
Another option is to re-sign the application with the entitlements necessary for debugging.
e.g:
https://gist.github.com/talaviram/1f21e141a137744c89e81b58f7...
- No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. All a new workspace achieves is making it difficult for me to switch between this app and my other apps! (individual apps can implement this, and some like VLC do, but most apps don't)
- No native support for containerisation. Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally everything else is super speedy, they're really slow.
What you get when you hold Option is the way that was the previous "maximisation" option, before they added the full screen mode which I also abhor.
I'm just trying to be helpful, possibly barely pointing out that things claimed to be impossible are not (and not argumentatively, only because folks may stop at that and have to endure something when there are solutions that would fit their use case)
My main issue is that all the different "Terminals" have subsets I like on them, but none have all the features I like lol. It's not a big deal though. FWIW I'm trying out the Warp term now (used wezterm on linux) and it's been mostly enjoyable so far.
The animation is shorter when you're on a model without a 120Hz screen, so it gets a little more bearable there.
But some of these may help. There may be more (or less), it's been a while.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.003
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.15
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true
I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to get rid of this workspace switch delay. The tipping point for me on it was switching to a 16" Pro with a 120 Hz screen and finding out that means it now takes longer to switch.
On the 120Hz MacBook Pros, there's an advanced iTerm2 setting that lets you change the maximum frame rate to 120 or above (adaptive frame rate also needs to be disabled).
For monitors with a high refresh rate, it's worth checking out. You can see the difference by running:
$ cat /dev/random | hexdumpBut it has Cmd+Shift+E, which I wish some other emulators I like would just wholesale copy that feature.
Honestly, it's one of the better emulators out there; it's my recommendation if you're otherwise stuck on macOS.
Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd<->inotify or you end up running intel images on aarch64, which uses non-virtualizing qemu to emulate the foreign CPU (see github.com/tonistigii/binfmt)
I'm using Docker in a Fusion instance, sharing /Users through vmhgfs (which in my tests performs better than DfM shares) and it's plenty fast as long as I stick to native images (intel on intel, aarch64 on arm64) and don't outrageously reach out to the shared dirs (notably DfM shares /tmp by default which is ridiculous)
Container tech on Darwin would bring little in most cases since it would containerize a darwin userland, which, while cool, is probably not what most people want. There's no shortcut from running a Linux kernel in a VM to run a Linux userland on Darwin.
If you haven't tried the new VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing in Docker for Mac, it makes a _huge_ difference to I/O performance of mounted volumes.
Nonetheless, I salute the years-long effort from the Docker team on that one.
Edit: the static blog generator I wrote [1] takes 11 seconds inside a Ubuntu virtual machine with the directory shared with MacOS on an Mac mini late 2014. Docker, on the same machine, takes 1m13 seconds using gRPC FUSE for file sharing. 1866 HTML files are being generated.
When you hold ALT while clicking the maximize button it should work. There used to be a setting for this when they introduced it.
One of the reasons why I almost never use the full screen feature. You can click on the full screen button on the too left-hand corner of each window whilst holding Option, I think that’s the closest you can do out-of-the box. You can assign a keyboard shortcut for this very easily (seriously, the way we can define keyboard shortcuts for almost anything and have them work in almost any app is amazing; nothing comes even close on the Linux side).
Otherwise, you can use something like Magnet or Rectangle, which enable exactly what you want.
macOS is frustrating to use without a mouse. On one side the shortcuts are consistent, work everywhere, and are very deeply customisable. Really much better than anything I have tried on other platforms. All the menus are very easy to use without a mouse once you know the shortcuts (which, granted, are not obvious if you don't know they exist). Emacs-like shortcuts in all text fields are absolutely fantastic. The fact that Command is used throughout the GUI leaves Control available for things like terminals, which is awesome (e.g. there is no conflict between Control-C to kill a process and Command-C to copy some text). But at the same time there are things like window management that pretty much require a mouse, but really should not.
> I miss the ability to set arbitrary shortcuts and bind them to arbitrary menu items.
> macOS is frustrating to use without a mouse.
Note that with any non-fullscreen window I can continue to see live updates to the window in the mission control view. So I could for example continue to watch a video (albeit smaller) while watching chat messages arrive in another window as my friend sends them. But with a macOS fullscreen window I can't do that. If I open mission control then I can only see the fullscreen window (because it's the only window in the workspace), and if I switch to another workspace to the see the contents of those windows I can no longer see the fullscreen window. Infuriating!
I’m still not sure why you can’t switch between applications even if they aren’t on the same workspace though. Cmd tab, Cmd tab takes me from a full-screen video to the last app on a separate workspace, and right back to the video.
And if you want to see other apps at the same time as the video, no wonder full-screen gets in the way.
> And if you want to see other apps at the same time as the video, no wonder full-screen gets in the way.
You say that, but is doesn't on windows or linux. And it didn't used to on macOS either until they changed things around a few years ago.
I would also recommend trying out if BetterTouchTool can't change the behaviour of the green (+) button as it's pretty powerful.
- Control external monitor sound volume. There are buggy paid and open source solutions, but they all trigger all kind of bugs with sound and macOS itself.
- Capture game audio with OBS together with microphone input.
- Being able to wait for files to copy and work Finder at the same time. Yeah I could find replacement for Finder, but why the hell?
- Use Valve Proton. Yeah, Linux is great to play games now.
And yeah PulseAudio is just so much better than everything macOS can offer.
PS: Yeah I'm currently on Mac because M1 is amazing and I left my Linux desktop at home due to unexpected immigration. Still I really wish to come back to use Linux as soon as I have option to.
capture sound: there's a flury of apps that allow you to do that, Rogue Amoeba has a couple that go from simple to very advanced audio routing. This audio routing also allows you to set the output volume (so, indirectly volume sent to a monitor) using the standard macOS controls.
> And yeah PulseAudio is just so much better than everything macOS can offer.
Someone has never dug into Audio Midi Setup, which can do a bunch of nice things already, including creating aggregated audio inputs and outputs.
The PulseAudio that is one of the factors that drove me off desktop linux in 2013? :)
Since the message that PA was here to stay was received, everyone got the point that the only way forward was to fix all the buggy audio drivers. It's no surprise, that it helped. Sure, it sucked for the affected users at the time, but in the long run, we all are better off.
Yes that one :)
It still sucks if you have to get too close to it and work around some of it's uh... things. But during normal usage, "it just works" these days and has been for a long time.
I'd still easily pick it over audio on windows. Also it's on the way out, and pipewire, which is replacing it is way more powerful again, while being drop-in. Let's see how long it takes for pipewire to be really stable though. But imo windows and OSX cannot compete with pulse, and certainly not with pipewire.
For me this is one of the most annoying missing feature of macOS, while there are 3rd party apps, I'd want to have it without installing anything extra. But as we know it hard (if not impossible) that Apple implements this feature for other than their supported devices (that is mostly their products and maybe some of the 3rd party displays that they sell in their official web store).
I'm sure there are more uses to be found but that was the most immediate I found.
Even Discord offer an option to audio game capture and one of first steps to install is "Disable SIP".
What any pulseaudio or pipewire-based desktop can do, is to route streams from separate applications to separate devices. You can have one application playing into your headphones, second into your speakers and third streaming over bluetooth to your soundbar. Never managed to do anything similar with Mac (also I never explored any 3rd-party apps to do it, they might exist, but with PA/Pipewire, it is built-in).
You can also mark some devices as not to use - i.e. DisplayPort advertises audio out, but the monitor has no speakers? So does your dock, but you don't intend to connect any speakers to it? Easy, disable that device. Not so easy on mac, just be sure to never select it for output, there's only one global output device anyway.
One of neatest things I did on Linux is playback of multiple audio streams while watching series when using VLC. It's very cool when you have some international group of friends together and e.g someone prefer to watch in German, someone in English and then someone in some other language.
So basically 3 people can connect their headphones to Linux PC and then everyone listen to their preferable language.
Mapping the streams to specific devices can be done via clicky GUI in pavucontrol.
What?
Though I haven't used MacOS in a very long time so I could be wrong.
I also manage my own Ubuntu desktop for work, and had to reinstall the system 3 times from scratch because it magically stopped working. In the end it turned out to be something with a new kernel, but it took me, dunno, 2 days to debug.
Oh sorry, might not have been very clear, thats what I meant.
As I say I haven't used MacOS in a while, but in my eyes its always been the strongest choice in terms of stability, with the tradeoff being control and to an extent (depending on what your doing with it) compatibility.
Windows seems to specialise in compatibility, Linux in control (I prefer saying that than customisation, which in my view makes light of it) and MacOS in stability.
Linux will let you shoot yourself in the foot. That is not a Linux problem, PEBKAC.
It's the reason I didn't move to Linux at home when Mac laptops were getting so awful a few years ago.
My work-issued Macbook Pro regularly forgets which monitor (my external monitor or the built-in display) is the primary monitor and moves the dock and task bar between them seemingly at random.
My mouse sensitivity is cranked all the way up but my mouse still feels like it's mired in tar compared to my Windows and Linux machines.
The dock is always in the way. I can hide it when a window approaches/overlaps it, but it often takes multiple swipes with the mouse to get it to reappear. Completely removing the dock (which would be my preference) does not seem to be an option. I was able to move it to the left side of the screen, which is better - why take up so much valuable vertical screen real estate with a top bar and a dock on the bottom???
So... I don't know. I'm not seeing it personally. For me Gnome, KDE, Windows 10, and Windows all provide a better GUI desktop experience than macOS.
I set mine to around 40 seconds. I haven’t seen my dock a year or so.
Note I’ve not jumped to Monterey yet so this is untested there.
I think you need to increase the tracking speed in "Mouse" preferences. Mine is about 75% and I can move across a 1440px screen with just a small flick.
The last straw for me (not stability related) was when I needed to scan something. Cue hours spent in the terminal… still no scanning.
MacOS will keep working for years for most everyone and has all basic functionality in place or easily installable. The same is true for Linux as a server, which I use every day.
My work PC has the uptime of 3 months right now. I've been using this particular PC for 26 months, with Ubuntu installed. No crashes. No problems. No slowdowns.
These testimonials where someone says "but it's <insert reasons that confirm it's bad>" are difficult to relate with. I also scan and print from time to time, I'm not advanced user of scanners/printers - but after plugging the devices in via USB, they did their job.
I had the pleasure of trying to work with containers on Mac the other day. After 10 minutes I gave up. Mac is a great machine but it's not for me, it definitely has its audience and I can tell it's great because it helps many types of users cut a lot of corners. I'm sure I could get containers to work with M1, if there was any kind of benefit to use a machine which is, hardware-wise, slower than the beefy one I use with Linux.
If testimonials about Linux being unstable are hard to relate to, you are absolutely in the minority of computer users or you have not used Linux very long. I still remember the days where I had to (lightly) edit C source code to get my WiFi drivers working...
I used it for a long time. I had problems with nvidia drivers, before that I had problems with modem drivers and the list goes on, from finding where xorg.conf is to which thing I need to modify so that I can have multiple monitors running. I tried many distros, I used i3wm for extended period of time until the keyboard navigation only started to bore me.
I believe my "membership card" has been shown.
Despite the problems, PopOS and Ubuntu have been very stable for me for the past 2.5 years. Problem is also often in users, who are quick to blame software when it doesn't work the way they imagined it must work. I haven't used software that instantly works great. However, for development (and running containers in particular), Linux has been stable and a total workhorse. I can even put up with uglier UI. It's also the only OS that I can shut down forcibly via button and it won't fall apart.
Could it be that the, often loud minority of angry users, simply reports problems because:
1. they imply knowledge and thus earn internet fame points? 2. they purposely twist the truth because they can? 3. they aren't particularly advanced users to begin with?
- Lots of people happily use "a dumpster fire" where you have "hours spent in the terminal… still no scanning" and are completely unbothered by serious issues you are describing.
- Your exaggeration is absolutely ridiculous.
Criticism is fine, but at least make it sound vaguely plausible.
If you like it, knock yourself out. I'll stick to OS's that employ product managers for my daily drivers.
My working mac hangs about 1 time in 3 days. With completely un-addressable memory leak and lag. And close everything don't help either. The only way I found to solve it reliably is a reboot. While my linux vm and main windows system lives like forever (heck, I don't even bother to reboot them if not a update, because why?).
From my perspective, I though you are just kidding. I don't even see it runs perfectly more than one week.
Thats probably why its so stable for you, you know it well, and that increased control of it allows you to make it as stable as you need.
However, generally speaking, Linux does not specialise in stability
Does that imply that Linux is not stable? I've had my Arch installation for a full year and it has never broken down on me. No package has ever broken, and updates are always smooth thanks to pacman.
Meanwhile, I can recall a handful of instances where bugs slipped into the macOS userspace in the last year (and made it to the front page of Hacker News)
I think I've almost never seen someone connect to a projector from Linux without some kind of glitch along the way.
My Linux machine on the other hand has never even once done that.
The desktop environment is not, no. Various applications one is likely to run on it are not, compared to some closed-source alternatives, including those provided on macOS.
Heavy Linux on the Desktop user for about 10 years, here (~2001-2011). I still try it periodically. I see a lot more bad glitches, X/Wayland crashes (may as well be a whole system crash, on a desktop), and application crashes, on Linux than elsewhere. I find it's most stable when I build up from something minimal and hand-configure everything, but I just don't have time for that anymore, and stopped finding it entertaining years ago.
So many variables (mainly who's using the computer and for what) go into this that its impossible to speak for everyone, but yeh generally speaking macOS is more stable than linux. You might have experienced more stability, whereas someone else might have experienced more control using macOS than on linux.
The second painpoint is the keyboard layout, which also sucks ass; 1. ~|"@, are all in the wrong places. 2. Some idiot decided to prioritice control keys ahead of functions keys, so I have to press fn to use standard debugging keys.
My i3/arch setup is far more reliable and ergonomic.
* Cannot drag to copy, middle-click to paste.
* No way to disable sticky keys lock.
* No way to set ESC as Caps Lock.
* No way to set a keyboard shortcut for each specific language. (I use five)
* Alt-tab to an _Application_, not a _Window_. How many times will I Alt-Tab to.... nothing!
* Return from sleep will rearrange the order of the connected monitors, even though they have not been disconnected, if the laptop lid is not opened.
hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000065,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x7000000e7}]}
Huh?
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys -> Caps Lock Key
And, while I don't have personal experience with it, it does seem like it may allow you to set up locale-based shortcuts, as well[2].
[1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/manual/configuratio...
[2] https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/#international
You should be able to do this with Karabiner Elements.
The command+tab switch is also driving me insane!
I loved Ubuntu's (probably around 12.04?) window+workspace (or however they called it) handling, but as all the teams I worked on, the devs used Mac, I decided to give in and switch. I miss the window handling options, but hopefully I gain from other aspects (such as being able to rely on coworkers in case something doesn't work as expected).
I've done this on my Macbook that has the Touch Bar and lacks an escape key to make vi possible.
- Open lid
- Lock screen shows
- Screen fades to black as it realises there's an external monitor
- Finally unlock, windows are all bunched up on the internal display
- Everything becomes unresponsive, maybe even another fade to black
- A minute after initially opening the lid, suddenly all the windows pop back into place
I have no idea if this is improved on M1 machines, but it's frustrating enough on my Intel 16" that I've just pushed all the auto-lock timeouts to excessively large durations.
That is, if you have for example a 27" 4K monitor next to a 27" 1080p monitor then the 1080p version is treated as though it's 25% of the size and the mouse gets "stuck" in the 4K monitor unless you're within the 50% of the screen that Windows thinks your 1080p monitor is adjacent to. This works sanely in macOS as it rightly treats each monitor as having the same size.
It's even more comical if you have a very high dpi laptop next to a 1080p or 1440p large desktop monitor.
It is really forgetful and switches the order of them when it wakes seemingly at random.
macOS's display handling has been flawless to me.
Hold ⌥.
> Alt-tab to an _Application_, not a _Window_.
It’s ⌘↹.
I think (at least some of) the others can also be done, but I’m not at my machine right now to check.
Okay, I tried it. Cmd+V doesn't paste what was highlighted. (The parent is referencing Linux's selection, which, AFAIK, doesn't exist in any form on macOS. iTerm2 tries to emulate it by using the clipboard, but that's not the same.)
If I'm supposed to middle click, I have absolutely no idea how to do that.
> It’s ⌘↹.
If "↹" is supposed to be "tab", no, that's no it. Cmd+Tab is, as op says, a switch between applications, and pulls all windows of a given app to the top of the Z-order. Alt+Tab's functionality (pull this particularly window to the top of the Z-order) is usually exactly what I what — I want a particular browser window, which I have positioned to the side so that I can still see, e.g., my editor. But then Cmd+Tab fronts unrelated stuff on top of it.
AFAIK, there is no equivalent to Alt+Tab is macOS. There's Cmd+`, but it is different still.
As a VIM user, I prefer the Escape function closer, where the Caps Lock key is. But having the old Esc key function as Caps Lock allows KDE to recognize it to swap languages.
macOS will, for me, happily rearrange windows even without sleeping it. Just returning to the machine after ~15 minutes (all while on external power) is sufficient to get a "hold on for 15 seconds while I rearrange the windows like a mad OS".
Meanwhile Linux can resume from sleep pretty much instantly, but Linux is the one that has all the trouble, according to folklore.
The lack of Alt+Tab kills me to this day. Cmd+Tab just doesn't work as well.
A lot of "i'd switch but" articles - in all directions - basically come down to "the destination doesn't work how i'm used to". Even though they're fundamentally as crappy in the background.
When someone asks me why I use Mac OS as my main desktop I answer "it's the least annoying". There is no "best OS" available now.
With that said, whilst I do like macOS overall I always found it infuriating how on macOS applications could steal focus. Something I do appreciate on Windows is that focus stealing by and large isn't a thing.
Interesting... I think the last time I used Windows everyone and their extended family stole focus all the time. But then I moved to Linux as my main desktop OS in like 1998... and to Mac OS in 2013.
Interesting. Focus stealing really is annoying, but from my experience Windows is not really better.
Until you need to run an app as Administrator, and then… everything disappears in favor of a blue screen (even on external monitors), with only a single confirmation modal remaining.
I’ve never understood why what is effectively ‘sudo’ needs to be a full-screen event.
I use macOS for the same deep work I use Windows 11 desktop for and I have no issues switching off into Linux on my cheap laptop to get some things done. Why waste time complaining? Adapt!
- SMB shares are wonky and will randomly disconnect with vague errors.
- A large USB drive formatted with NTFS can't be mounted as read/write natively, you have to pay for a third party tool for that.
- Mac's built in gatekeeper software is inferior to Windows Defender. While there's less malware available, the ones out there can cause havoc and don't get caught.
- lastly, Mac restore process is not as easy as Windows, you can reset a Windows PC in a few clicks. Mac your manually nuking volumes, which for a newbie isn't really friendly.
The actual transfer operations are pretty straightforward, but the negotiation steps are _very_ intricate and the Microsoft docs about the protocols are less than honest at times.
This is not true. Macs had an in-place reinstall before Windows did, IIRC.
Not built-in, but the open source https://rectangleapp.com/ supports window snapping by mouse and via shortcuts.
When I had a PowerMac, every time I needed to burn a CD/DVD I had to look up the steps. Dragging a window from one monitor to the other often doesn't display the window, and if a window is full-screen, Option-Tab won't bring any other windows on top of it.
The hardware is nice, and generally high quality, but my battery started to bulge and the repair (replace keyboard and new batter) was over $500.
I like it, but I wouldn't turn up my nose at alternatives. Since most of my job is typing, and web browsing, almost anything short of a Commodore VIC-20 would be fine.
- Login screen sometimes has US keyboard layout even when the language selector shows otherwise.
- "Installing apps" where you drag them on the applications folder and you get no progress for that copy operation anywhere.
- Permission changes, for example for camera and microphone access, require application restarts.
- Photos application unable to handle even a small amount of pictures copied from my phone, crashes or freezes your machine.
- Thumbnail size in file selection dialogs and even directly in Finder is completely useless.
What apps do you install that take so long that a progress bar would be useful?
"- Photos application unable to handle even a small amount of pictures copied from my phone, crashes or freezes your machine."
I have thousands of pictures in Photos, and it has never once frozen or crashed. Are you doing something unusual?
"- Thumbnail size in file selection dialogs and even directly in Finder is completely useless."
This is adjustable.
I can use control+left/right to switch desktops, but can use shift+control+left/right to move a window left or right.
IMO it hides less about the disk layout than Windows Explorer does, but "it's better than Windows Explorer" is a low bar indeed.
"don't get me started on the Magic Mouse and it's charging port"
I use that mouse every day and I've literally NEVER needed to use it while charging. It warns me with ample time and charges insanely quickly. I get a warning? I'll plug it in when I get a coffee or over lunch. End of.
The other thing that nobody seems to pay any attention to is this: The current Magic Mouse is pretty much EXACTLY the same as the prior AAA-powered version except for the battery and charging. I'd bet folding money that one reason they went the way they did was that it allowed them to make zero design changes outside the area that USED to hold AAA batters, and now holds the rechargeable battery and port.
This means they could do a rechargeable version without a major redesign -- which would've been required. The whole upper shell of the mouse moves down when you click, which means putting a port on the front wasn't going to work.
But, again: it's 100% a non-issue for me. I don't actually know anyone in real life who has trouble with this.
The touchpad started to drift and the clicking mechanism started to go wonky.
In short, I think the MBP is pretty solid, but if you get a lemon build version, you're stuck with it.
I love Ubuntu and I use it with Cinnamon desktop on the daily alongside my Mac, and I love the customizability, but I also like just being able to turn on my laptop and do stuff without having to fiddle with a terminal unless I want to, or install a new app by just downloading a thing and clicking on it and agreeing that, yes, I'm trying to do this thing. And that's just not quite there with Ubuntu yet.
(Also, trying to do music stuff is mostly a nightmare of JACK and Alsa headaches. I can write generative music code in at least two languages, but I just wanna plug my guitar in and record things and use plug-ins without having to recompile shit.)
There's places for both. Use whatever works for you.
This means that without any special setup, both real-time audio software (which uses JACK) and 'normal' software (Pulse, ALSA) can co-operate on a single system with a single digital patchbay between all of them and the system output devices (including Bluetooth audio devices).
I mean if that's a legitimate black mark, that's 1 ding against MacOS and we can bury Linux under a thick pile of back marks.
I can print in MacOS, but I cannot scan. It used to work, but color scanning was broken few years ago, and about two years ago b/w scanning was broken too - Preview or Image Capture will just produce something malformed.
There used to be a workaround using Samsung scanning utility, but it doesn't work since Catalina, due to the utility being 32-bit app.
So what I do? RDP into other machine that does not have such problems (either Linux or Windows) and then transfer the scanned file.
So much for "just works".
This hasn't been a problem in a while. You definitely don't need Jack for recording your guitar into a DAW with a backing track (I have a studio full of synths that I record - 24 tracks in, 24 tracks out, via a class compliant USB audio interface). And as the sibling comment points out, Pipewire makes things better still; you can point your DAW at "ALSA" (really Pipewire under the hood) and also play Youtube vids in a browser at the same time - this was of course possible with Pulseaudio or Jack, but both of them had their own quirks. Pipewire is overall really nice and just works cleanly.
I am really curious what you had to recompile.
It saddens me that there are so many cases where the 'better' way to do things gets lost in the noise of the beginner-friendly masses, and can't be standard because people aren't used to it.
Another example of this is electric vehicles and one-pedal driving. Only a few EVs (BMW i3, for example) allow you to mainly drive with the accelerator, where releasing it slows the car to a stop, without use of brakes.
A lot of our electronics suffer from this too. You notice it sometimes if you compare electronics sold in Japan to those sold in the US. The market here is seen to not support 'too many' buttons and features so we get a dumbed down version.
I'm assuming "here" is USA. I don't know much about what's sold in Japan, but I feel like most gadgets still have way too many buttons. I'd wager that most microwave users don't know what most of the buttons on a microwave do. I certainly don't. I'd love to get one with a more streamlined UI, but they're hard to find. Remote controls are similar. I'm kind of scared to imagine what a Japanese microwave might look like.
I dunno, I guess my brain is just wired differently from what apple expects.
It’s defaulted to “natural” something and it’s literally the first setting I change when I reinstall macOS
I don’t have a mac near me but when I did, I could not get them set to be the way I wanted.
I mean I don't think it's wrong or good, I think it's limited and has its share of market within people who don't want to waste time reading manuals of being involved in software or systems, what I find upsetting every now and then is those cool people coming around communities and say "Why Linux can't be MacOS?" I think each system has it's target, all of them cover different needs, I really don't understand who uses something and wants something else to become like the something they use and not use the somethign they already use .. I wish someone had an explanation for this humanity trait for me
But I really hated the lack of customisation, and also the way that they change stuff around all the time, screwing with my muscle memory. macOS in the Tiger days was pretty perfect for me, but since then things have gone downhill. Now virtual desktops are no longer possible in a grid but only a line, expose has been replaced with Mission Control that doesn't work as well. The overall design is worse and every release they lock more configuration files down. Try to change sshd_config so you can only authenticate with private keys, not passwords - a very sane configuration that is widely recommended. macOS will revert it with every update.
Anyway in the end I just decided I was done with it. I still use it for work but at home I moved to FreeBSD with KDE.. I love its customisation options <3
Slightly related: I feel it's worth spreading the word about yabai [1], a tiling window manager for MacOs. I've been using it for >1 year, to get an i3 like experience, and find that it makes using MacOs very pleasant.
Issues in the article are somewhat addressed:
> Focus Follow Mouse
Can do this with yabai
> Always on top windows
Can do this with yabai
> Window snapping
Can do this with yabai
The way I use it: I have 9 desktops, and can switch between them via the keyboard (ctrl+<desktop_number>). Can move apps from one desktop to another via keyboard commands. Apps are automatically resized to fit. Can move apps around on screen via keyboard commands.
When you plug in an external display, do windows move over to it? And if you change the resolution on one display when doing so, do the windows resize as they should?
It seemed at the time like their reliance on macOS’s accessibility settings to manage windows made them fairly limited.
> reliance on macOS’s accessibility settings to manage windows made them fairly limited
I think that yabai goes a bit deeper than other MacOs WMs; it gets you to disable (or partially disable) MacOs's system integrity protection, so it can use the OS window manager directly.
I thought Accessibility settings had that, but:
> I find the menu bar at the top too small.
So not system font, menu bar size relative to the rest.
Accessibility settings>Display>Menu bar size>Large
> Focus Follow Mouse
There used to be this, not sure if it works still:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -bool false
> Change my mouse button order
USB Overdrive is a crazy good piece of software allowing that and more like full tracking speed and acceleration control, for any USB or Bluetooth input device (keyboards, mice, gamepads) either globally, per device, and/or per app.
I've heard that ffm is available on Terminal. Cute, but I need it for every window and between apps.
Although what you can't do (I think) is having (input) focus on a non-raised window, because that would break the focused-app-is-active-app-hence-menubar (because keyboard shortcuts) model imposed by the window manager.
[1] https://www.docker.com/blog/speed-boost-achievement-unlocked...
Not as good as native linux though.
This is because it’s running in a VM, not natively on the host. On Linux you can do any of those things from the host directly, without needing to shell into the container.
I actually found this so incredibly frustrating when I started working at a job that uses docker that I argued in vain against using docker at all, and then when that failed, I switched to doing all my coding and other technical work on a Linux VM and only using macOS for email.
But yeah, otherwise it will be a Linux VM running on top of Hyper-V.
If it was built against a different Unix (say Solaris) it still wouldn't help MacOS
That is something I do actually like there. And Apple isn't even forcing developers to do it (unless they want to publish in the app store which most apps I use don't do), just more and more app developers sandbox themselves.
As a developer who needs docker, OSX is not the best choice. If I was a designer, OSX is a better choice.
1) inability to ask the window manager "which workspace/desktop am I on" - it also seems like this ability has been progressively removed with newer versions (judging from stackoverflow/askdifferent questions) - after some hacking I've found a workaround for this
2) clicking on a browser notification just brings me to _any_ window of the browser, not the one that sent the notification! - if anyone knows how to fix this please help me out
3) there's a delay on toggling caps lock that you can't disable without installing some small third party utility! it just feels super rude that they're essentially telling me that I didn't mean to press caps lock
Which reminds me, another missing thing is the ability to have desktops displayed in the status bar and click on the one you want to jump to.
I just swipe up with three fingers on the Trackpad to see what desktop I'm on, are you looking for something different?
For me it's also ingrained Command-Q into my brain to close an app. Especially because even before this change apps often didn't close when you closed the last window. It's always been like that. Only some apps like System Preferences do it.
Clearly the appropriate solution would be to somehow make sure that I never need to force close the application, but the damn thing won't even let me restart if some app has hung (I am looking at you MS teams!)
I’d put more money on people on Touchpad devices force quitting more often than anticipated, so they removed it.
You should be able to mount a NFS share on login by mounting it, go to the login items settings of your user and add the mount there.
For your mouse: Ask your vendor to provide a driver for macOS. This is a usual problem with a lot of hardware. A lot of vendors don't provide a driver for macOS.
I move back and forth between macOS and Ubuntu, and think the combination is wonderful. It keeps me honest in terms of which tools and workflows are actually portable, and makes me appreciate the things each system does better.
Window tiling and mouse button customization are easy and safe.
> I have multiple screens and multiple windows. I want to be able to hover over a new one and start interacting with it without clicking.
Having attempted to implement this once, doing this is nontrivial. If you try to focus anything under your mouse then you can end up changing the selection state of tables and controls, which is generally undesirable.
Doing this in a way that feels intuitive is non-trivial. If you go the simple route and focus every control (so you can do things like tab between them) you run into the issue of the mouse activating some of them as you go over the element and giving it focus–for example, if you do it on a window sidebar, you'll switch between the tabs. I didn't get a chance to really thing about it, but I was thinking of just giving text elements focus and considering it to be good enough; but there are still challenges there: should you be able to focus on a search field (which might blow away the current context and replace it with a "searching" screen)? How should I handle keyboard shortcuts?
With multiple monitors it makes much more sense to me than click to focus.
I tried it on windows but a lot of programs don't expect it and raise themselves when they get focus. My mac has only one monitor.
In most window managers (including Windows), the first-class entity is the window. Windows are related to applications (or processes), but they exist as their own thing, operate independently from most other windows without special handling, and usually have their own menu bar.
Apple took a severely different tack on this fundamental abstraction: the first-class entity is the application. At all times, there is at most one application with foreground context and all others are background, and it's actually a pretty expensive operation to switch between them. They did this for a couple reasons (some accident of history and some practical... for example, Apple's decision to put the application's menu at the top of the screen to coincide with the original usability studies on how the edges and corners of the screen were the easiest to mouse to implied there'd be at most one application at a time owning a global menubar context).
This had huge consequences for the constraints put on applications. For a long time, it was hard to write a tiling window manager for Mac OS X because there was no language by which you could describe all windows; you'd have to query every app for the geometry of its windows, then compute a new global layout, then foreground each app so it could update its window positions. This is no longer the case, but it made any TWM implementation a toy for years.
The upshot of this design for focus-follows-mouse is it has a lot of unintended consequences and can make the system actually quite hard to use in a focus-follows-mouse configuration. For one, it induces latency in all your mouse operations if you're constantly toggling the foreground app as you mouse around. For another, it actually makes it quite difficult to mouse to the menu bar if the menu bar is going to change when your mouse drifts over another window.
(It is interesting to observe how, while at some level "they're all just window managers," the detailed decisions made by the different OS developers led to some things being subtlety much harder in one or the other).
So many ways on windows / linux.
> Can't you just use a different X?
Lol, this is Apple we're talking about, the company famous for not allowing people to customize things to their own liking (for better or worse).
It is launched via /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Finder.plist
I find this very foreign. As if a unix system didn't let you change the shell!
This is sad to hear, because I'm a happy user of a headless macOS (not set up by me), to which I ssh almost daily for testing purposes, and it is a fairly decent unix system. It has a few idiosyncrasies, sure, but those help to make your pipelines more portable. I always supposed that the GUI would be just a regular program running on top of that unix.
I’m not 100% sure but I’d say it’s pretty likely Mac OS works the same way, just like on Mac OS the left part of the menu bar (including the system menu) is drawn and managed by the current application (using a system library so the application developer doesn’t have to worry about how it works).
IIRC it is not drawn by the application, it's a system app that gets the focused (or rather, activated) app menu hierarchy as the app instructs through some IPC, but it's not the app process itself drawing there. The only part where an app actually can draw is on the right part, when one implements menu bar extras (which previously required hacks to inject into because the menubar extra API was severely limited, but IIUC now has a dedicated, managed API to replace the hacks)
Also through dock you can configure a window to be on all of the screens
*<-using macos 10.14
I'd already be happy if maximizing a window on macOS worked reliably.
I've referred to macOS's "maximize window" feature, which you trigger by double-clicking a window's title bar.
This would create a situation where an application has one window foreground above the foreground application while it is not the foreground application.
On the UI / implementation side: I don't think it's possible to have any windows of an app foregrounded past the foreground app's frontmost window if that app isn't itself foreground. They'd have to create a new category of window (and probably move a bunch of internal data structures around) to make that possible. I know, "it's just code," but it's code based on some very deep and old assumptions about the way the window manager works that probably have hard-to-predict consequences if violated.
On the UX side: having a window floating foreground when the top-of-desktop menubar says another app's name in the corner is going to trigger a "WAT" for a lot of users, and I think Apple is deferring to them.
Disable font anti-aliasing and enable full hinting (essential to get sharp fonts without needing a slower and more expensive 4K monitor)
Disable vsync (necessary for reducing latency to the absolute minimum when you don't care about tearing; requires Xorg)
Disable window decorations (for a pseudo-fullscreen mode that leaves the panel visible)
Disable mouse acceleration
Disable mouse wheel acceleration
Change mouse polling rate
Set keyboard auto-repeat to arbitrary values (I use 72Hz auto-repeat with 200ms delay)
Remap colors for compatibility with display hardware with non-standard black/white levels (I have a DVI to VGA converter that expects TV black level but computer white level)
Send arbitrary DDC commands to the monitor (e.g. to change brightness)
Disable and enable the mouse in software (to prevent accidentally waking from power saving with mouse movements)
Switch virtual desktops by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen and then moving the mouse wheel (corners have infinite size for the purposes of Fitt's law, and mouse wheel inputs should only change presentation of data not the data itself, which means there's no danger from missing the corner, so this is the best way of quickly switching desktops by mouse).
Disable all UI animations
System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> Menu bar size
(This doesn't let you change the menu bar to a different font, but it does make the whole menu bar including the font bigger, without changing the screen resolution, which seems to be what the author wants?)
It’s hard to keep reading when this is the first sentence. You can’t really criticize something you admittedly haven’t “got”.
I had the opposite experience almost 40 years ago with the classic Mac and 20 years ago with Mac OS X. The appeal was obvious and instant.
The only thing I can relate to from the post is that I wish Apple added native support for FUSE.
I'd love to be able to just plug the damn phone into USB and transferring files like a normal person though, but Apple doesn't seem to want to play that game, sadly...
Right now, Android File Transfer of macOS is so bad I basically just use adb for everything.
brew install sshfs
Seriously I have utterly no idea why no one has bothered to create a new protocol that is designed with the capabilities and capacities of modern devices in mind, not with "fits for managing a 256MB-sized MP3 player or a point and click consumer camera with a 2 GB SD card".
Things I can do on MacOS: - Edit any document or video within minutues of installation
- Use sed/awk/find/grep on any documents or text like with Ubuntu
Linux desktop tries too much to be like macos making it even worse. Every time I have to remove avahi, cups and like 10 other things which breaks the whole damn thing and I have to figure out how to unbreak it then get rid of shitty networkmanager so I can write a systemd unit to get thr network to do what I want and avoid my dns resolvers being replaced and edit grub2 config at least 3 times to get it to actually take so the interface names are not e9xnfhsjfkszhfj02 but just eth0 and then spend half a day to get secure boot working. And then I have to find the apps I want to use and block a weekend aside to set them up.
I use mac to just get things done, I use linux for control and to get them done the way I want.
fd, rg, and vim work just fine on the Mac..
Bundled sed is the bsd variant, but you can bring whichever flavor of these you want, I'm very confused by your comment.
I think using "Linux" here isn't accurate. ElementaryOS? Definitely. But default KDE Plasma for example does not attempt to look like MacOS at all, same as Cinnamon, which by default resembles Windows to an extent.
I don't get it. You're removing services manually and complain it breaks your system. Why remove them then? (For extra irony, avahi is there to support Apple's Bonjour and cups belongs to Apple - I don't expect you're turning those off on your MacOs, right?)
networks:
vpcbr:
driver: bridge
ipam:
config:
- subnet: 10.20.0.0/16
gateway: 10.20.0.1
networks:
vpcbr:
ipv4_address: 10.20.0.6
With OSX I have to use things like 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.2, but my docker compose file isn't aware of it, and it is very hacky.
Linux networking supporting is phenomenal and so flexible.
I need a computer that works without too much fiddling required for 80% of the way. When I shut the laptop lid, it should sustainably go to sleep, and when I open it up, it should let me work from where I left off instantly. It may be possible to do this with some linux distributions, but then I would either have to know some black magic or give up something else like have a decent battery life.
I love and use Linux for all things serious _on_ _servers_! Desktop Linux has been a democratic tragedy of the commons. Too many chefs in the kitchen comes up with a meal that has too many flavours in a single dish.
> I know you're going to be tempted to reply with "you're using it wrong" - but I'm not. This is how I like to use my computer.
This part of the closing statement simply baffles me. I use both Linux and a Mac and I like both. In fact MacOS has spoilt me in many ways and I get frustrated when things don't work as nicely on Linux. But I still like both.
In short, it's FUD, and the author is not honest in his assessment. As such, the article is without merit. So, what can you not do on Linux that you can do on Mac?
That's true excluding registry hacks 99.9% of people couldn't care less about.
In Linux on the other hand a TON of things do require using console.
> In short, it's FUD, and the author is not honest in his assessment.
I've heard this assessment from rabid Linux fanatics before.
However "FUD" is more likely your assessment of the article because it's as factual as it can be considering I've been using Linux as my primary OS for 25 years now.
> As such, the article is without merit.
Well, you've spent 10 seconds reading it, so your comment is without merit.
> So, what can you not do on Linux that you can do on Mac?
No clue, I've never used MacOS to a large extent (excluding wasting 3 days trying to install Windows next to it which I succeeded but I hated every second of that experience considering I had to even use BIOS loader hacks to make Windows work), the article is not about an Apple OS either.
There's no way I'll ever do that again. Apple hardware is meant for Apple software, period. Using anything else is a never ending source of pain.
When was the last time you used Linux?
For a 'normal' desktop user, they will see the terminal as much as they would using Windows, basically not at all. Especially across most of the main user-focused distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, MX, Zorin, etc.
> There's no way I'll ever do that again. Apple hardware is meant for Apple software, period. Using anything else is a never ending source of pain.
You accuse DocTomoe of essentially being a Linux fanatic and the use the same rethoric immediately afterwards...
$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version: :core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Fedora
Description: Fedora release 35 (Thirty Five)
Release: 35
Codename: ThirtyFive
This is blatantly false.
Anyways, this goes nowhere, so goodbye.
- Cannot run a bunch of programs that stay on the topbar, like LINE (https://line.me/en/), Kap (https://getkap.co/), etc. I am a fairly heavy user of Kap and I love the interface, so this is probably the biggest differentiator for me. I can use Gimp, Inkscape, etc. on Mac so this is not really reversible.
- The visual quality of the programs in Mac is generally a lot higher, and humans do like aesthetic visuals. For example the "CPU indicator" (iStat) I have in mac is an order of magnitude better, same as VPN tool, etc.
- Upgrading the OS to a major version without worrying if I'll be able to boot next time.
- (unfair?) 10+ hours of real-world battery usage, in Linux I could often get half of the advertised 5-6h battery life from the PCs if lucky
- A lot more hardware stuff with the M1 Macbook Air, like the amazing touchpad, keyboard (in new models), etc. Some will say it's fair to compare them some won't, so I'll leave that up to you but summarize them all in this point. I want to try Asahi Linux when it comes out stable though!
- Drivers all work very well, it's like they built them on purpose for their hardware (!). No more fighting with pulseaudio.
However overall I've found them to be a lot more similar than dissimilar to my surprise, swapping from one to another as a normal everyday JS dev is fairly trivial. To add on the author's list, the biggest issue I have is with external USBs, I like having them encrypted for backups and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that with mac. I had no trouble with AndroidUSB, just install it and it behaves just like another filesystem program.
The visual quality of a well-themed KDE or similar DE is imo above and beyond anything macOS can do.
In 2022, booting a new OS update is not a problem that exists anymore on Linux. If you use a rolling release, you don't even need to worry about major updates, they're not a thing. Meanwhile, update hell on macOS has been a big issue for me in the past.
As far as drivers, ime on dozens of laptops there is no real issue beyond GPUs on laptop (Optimus) and WiFi, also pulseaudio isn't a thing anymore. But it's a "cry once" kind of situation.
Same with Linux - if you choose appropriate hardware designed for Linux, instead of installing it on random hardware.
Trivial using Disk Utility: https://support.apple.com/de-de/guide/disk-utility/dskutl356...
As for backups, I'd just use the disk as an encrypted Time Machine target.
Yeah, well my friend's Intel Mac mini got bricked when he updated from Big Sur to Monterey in the first week after release. Needed to send it to Apple service. IMO Mac updates are almost as broken nowadays as Linux updates were 7+ years ago when I daily driven it.
I also upgraded my Thinkpad X220 from Windows 7 to Windows 10 when the update showed in my system, and everything worked without any reinstall since then.
Pulseaudio is not related to drivers, but since you mentioned it, pipewire replaced pulse recently and it's way better than anything macos provides. You just can't operate on audio channels this way on a Mac.
On the other hand, there's lots of drivers which are missing on a Mac or require obnoxious upstream apps. For example Logitech has a 300MB macos app for configuring my mouse, 200MB app for the camera, and printer/scanner comes with ads. They work... sind of. Same settings/devices are exposed in Linux by default, without extra work.
> Upgrading the OS to a major version without worrying if I'll be able to boot next time.
You've been lucky. I've lost the system twice due to updates.
LINE works through Wine, if you ever need it on Linux. https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
You didn’t used to have to do that in macOS? I remember plugging in my android phone and it mounting my memory card. Is OP referring to accessing something else?
> Mount an SSH or NFS drive
> In Ubuntu, I get a nice little GUI for picking network shares. Impossible on Mac.
I’m a little curious what the difference is between macOS and Linux here.
There’s definitely a lot of legitimate points here and a few questions on others.
Mass devices can be easily corrupted and have to be unmounted from the current device. MTP can stay mounted and accessible by the mounting OS and source device simultaneously and are much more difficult to corrupt.
It also allows the host device more security and control over what the guest can do.
- You can't allow apps on the phone access to the filesystem at the same time as it is mounted as a mass storage device (because you may corrupt the FS).
- It doesn't work with full-disk encryption used by newer Android versions, because your computer doesn't have the key (and the key is probably stored somewhere in the TPM of your phone, encrypted by your password).
- It requires the computer to support the FS used by the phone, which means necessarily using something that Windows/macOS supports (which mostly limits it to FAT/exFAT/NTFS)
So starting from Android... 5 or so? you can't mount as mass storage anymore. This probably consists of 99.5%+ of currently functioning Android phones.
MTP is file-level protocol and you can continue accessing all files on the phone at the same time as accessing them from your computer. MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and so works out-of-the-box in Windows. Linux supports it for 8+ years through GVFS and KIO, while Apple doesn't to this day.
* Not being able to easily rename a series of files (i.e. with `tab`).
* How it defaults to searching the entire computer rather than the current folder.
* The unintuitive way that moving files works (i.e. you can't just cmd-x, cmd-v, like everywhere else, you have to copy it, then opt-cmd-v).
I recognize that posting this invites someone to tell me I'm doin' it wrong, and there's actually a better way to do these things. I welcome that!
I recently put the latest Ubuntu LTS Linux on a spare laptop, as I needed a laptop. Sure, it was fun configuring everything for a day or so. But then it started to grind me down, as Linux always seem to do (for a personal computer - it's fantastic on servers).
Then I had a new, big project come in and bought a new MacBook Pro 13" with the M1 chip.
Wow.
I have never had a computer anywhere near as nice as this. Very fast. Light. Days of battery. Screen is fantastic. Best keyboard I've ever used. Best trackpad I've ever used by far. Never gets hot, barely warm, fan rarely comes on. I can do things like extend my screen to my iPad Pro 12.9" OR use Universal Control to control both from either keyboard/mouse/trackpad.
It has the Touchpad, which I'm undecided about but mostly like.
I work on Linux servers all the time, and the free/open source iTerm2 is a really really good terminal app.
It's BSD Unix under the hood, so most Linux commands also work here, and there's Homebrew to install whatever you like.
And the productivity apps are fantastic, many of which only exist on the Apple platforms, like Omnifocus.
So yes, I like Linux, but I'm so much more productive using a Mac these days.
So I don't really get where the OP is coming from.
Like window tracking - yes, I've used that on Linux but I actually find it equally annoying. If it's on, I don't like it. If it's off, I sometimes miss it ;-)
Downloading a 3rd party tool is one thing (I wouldn't have a huge problem if it was open source), but a lot of times these tools are closed source and require you to pay out of pocket! This would never ever fly in the Linux community. How come this is commonly accepted and never challenged?
(A controversial viewpoint I thought about is maybe that macOS users on average make more money than Linux users and hence never think about this, but I don't want to put it forward as the definitive answer)
EDIT: Perfect example I thought of is my friend asking me for help on how to reconfigure deep click (or Force Touch as it's called) to open new tabs in his browser, and I had a look around and the recommended way is to pay for BetterTouchTool [1]. No free way to do this that I could find.
[1]: https://folivora.ai/
Why on earth would I have an issue with a dev charging a few bucks for an app that does what I want? This is very normal behavior and Linux is the oddball.
Focus-follows-mouse, UI customisability, package management, second-hand citizen status of Linux apps, and a few others. It's also interesting to see what has appeared as supported / possible, on both operating systems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060613222321/http://www.linuxd...
Page 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20060613222321/http://www.linuxd...
Page 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20060613222321/http://www.linuxd...
Page 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20060613222321/http://www.linuxd...
Best I can tell, that was never actually discussed on HN.
> This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isn't my computer - it is Apple's.
For me its the old adage - I can hammer a nail into a piece of wood with a screwdriver, but a hammer might do the job a lot better. If your company is providing you a screwdriver to use as a hammer, thats a problem.
I kind of wish tech would operate more like the trades—where the tradespeople provide/manage their own toolbox and tools. BYOD has its benefits. Its unfortunately that a lot of companies tend to disallow it.
Things I can do on macOS that I can't do on Ubuntu:
- Buy a laptop, plug it in to my corporate network, and get to work in fifteen minutes.
- Buy a laptop, hand it to a non-programmer, and rest easy knowing they will never ever ever need to open the terminal
- use a CAC
- get more than eight hours of battery life on a laptop
- play audio
- record audio
- anything that relies on the above
The author mentioned a common retort which is “you’re doing it wrong”… well in my case I most definitely am doing it wrong. I don’t know how, exactly, but no doubt. But point is with macOS I can do nothing and it still just works. Who knows what I would have to do to get my Ubuntu machine to work. And it might be the machine, not the OS. Another reason bundling the machine and the OS together such that they just work is a good idea.
I’ll take working audio over any of the author’s examples any day.
And if your audio works on Ubuntu, great! That just doesn’t help me though. So Mac it is, as far as audio is concerned.
I'll agree though, even as a Linux user: audio sucks. For the past 20 years there's been like 3 different audio standards, each with their own advantages/flaws and nobody settled on one that we'd just all use. That's why pipewire exists: you can now mix-and-match between all of these systems and get a CoreAudio-like experience out-of-the-box. It's very nice, and I can genuinely not think of a single use-case that couldn't be served by it. You wanna screenrecord while recording from YouTube into your DAW while playing a game and livestreaming it all at the same time? PipeWire has you covered.
The real shame is window servers. Both xorg and Wayland are some of the worst software I've ever used, and neither of them even come close to Quartz on MacOS. It's the main thing that keeps Linux feeling like a server OS running desktop software; neither of these solutions are complete or stable. There's no replacement for them either, Wayland took more than 10 years to build and it's still awful and works on a small handful of software.
Desktop Linux will always be a niche experience. As someone who fits into that niche, I absolutely love it, but I'm not mad or confused when people say they simply don't like it; I get it, I really do.
Wow, this one actually surprised me quite a bit.
Apple makes some of the best accessibility tools (imo), but I just did a dive in the settings and couldn't find anything!
Alternatives have been mentioned here, but I use https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ for stuff like this typically.
It takes a bit of setup, but it's an extremely flexible and solid tool so far for me. It exposes a lot on a lower level which makes it feel more stable in general.
* BetterSnapTool for window snapping and maximization (although I prefer Moom for better control).
* Afloat to force a particular window to always be on top.
* TinkerTool to mess with various other settings.
Sure, these may not be “built-in” as first party capabilities, but Apple has a history of slowly bringing such capabilities into the OS over time. Flux (for altering screen tint at night time) became standard. So did TextExpander (for auto-expanding abbreviations).
That is, without any third party additions, I was under the impression you could achieve FFM by enabling a very particular setting inside the accessibility menu in system settings.
I can't test this because I don't have a modern enough OSX running in my office but I swear I saw this as of High Sierra or something.
Am I making this up ?
When I was skimming this thread last night I was positive this was an option at one point but when I went into System Preferences to look I could no longer find it. Was making me lose my mind.
Or maybe we’re at a Berenstein/Berenstain situation here.
EDIT: Although I have to admit that I'm not sure what focus-follows-mouse means. Do the windows come to the foreground when hovering over then?
I don't get it, this is basic stuff. Not advanced stuff.
- cannot invert scrolling just for mouse (I use normal mouse with wheel, not apple mouse) -> I have an app for that
- cannot connect Mac to a low dpi screen (like 1080p) without macOS looking like crap
On the other hand, macOS can run MS Office, or professional video and photo editing apps, which Linux cannot do. Alternatives exist, but are IMO worse.
I use this instead: https://github.com/pilotmoon/Scroll-Reverser and it works well. Generally my preferred settings is like this: natural scrolling (ie. the mac default) for trackpad, but inversed (ie. linux/windows default) scrolling for mouse.
Once mobile comes into play, it's literally not even a contest anymore, I gave up on trying to have a mobile experience as good as Mac.
Windows frequently with 4K HDMI plugged in, the "System" process gets stuck at 10% and machine becomes unusable.
I miss back when you could do this in Linux. Ever since GNOME 3, compiz has become a piece of software that integrates poorly with the rest of the desktop and causes screen taring or straight-up driver crashes if you enable wobbly windows.
Little snitch is a thing thankfully, but it is still nagging me for $49 dollars and will probably have to give them my PII to pay for it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=focus+follows+mouse+wayland was inconclusive.
If the author is arguing that these are deal breakers for the average person, they are ignorant or delusional.
Which I switched from Arch back to macOS this was the first I downloaded to improve productivity.
The only thing that pisses me off, is that the MS-Teams client for Linux is roughly 5 decades behind the Windows client, feature and stability-wise.
(And still have Windows on my private laptop for Fusion360 and games)
With Windows, put simply, you don't own your computer.
I haven't used Windows in over a decade and cannot be happier about it.
Windows at this point is a games console for keyboard and mouse games. Nobody uses Windows for anything serious, except old ATMs running Windows 95 and airports that want to embarrass themselves with blue screens of death. Most of the stuff on Azure including Azure itself is Linux based.
Also, I hate Hungarian notation.
No OS should try to emulate everything that other Operating Systems do well. You can‘t make a highly opinionated OS like macOS highly customizable without compromising the initial vision. The same is true the other way around.
MacOS allows for a surprising customizability through third-party apps and I personally think this is a great solution. It hides the complexity in a way that makes it invisible to users that would be confused by additional option and allows them to get customization as an app that is supported by a third-party dev.
I personally think Windows is what you get if you want to be macOS and Linux. I‘m financing my studies by supporting MS365 instances and I don‘t think it works all too well. While I like the new scripting capabilities, the UI definitely got more confusing since the Windows 7 days.
TLDR: I personally believe diversity is good for the OS market, not every OS has to accommodate every type of user.
Because, as I say in the post, I have to use one for work.
I agree that diversity is good but there are some things - like basic accessibility - which should be non-negotiable. And they certainly shouldn't be paid-for addons.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, but I disagree that lack of accessibility options is one of them. They natively support tons of accessibility features, and as far as I’m aware people with disabilities often choose Apple products precisely because they excel at it.
1. Doesn't describe the screen well. Either "you are on a button" or will read everything with no positional context.
2. Doesn't tell you when the screen changes. You press "continue" and it says "you are on a button"
3. When you try to move through the list of wifi SSNs it jumps to the password entry every time you move without telling you which one was selected.
4. The default speed, 50%, is stupid fast. I had to look up how to change the speed.
5. The tutorial was hard to understand and I had to look up the online documentation to get an idea of how it works. The accessibility of that site seems pretty low but luckily I actually am visual.
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/use-voiceover-util...
That being said, I've tied using a pure linux system for my work. I gave up when I couldn't get a somewhat current ruby version installed withing 30 minutes. The grass is a vague yellow on all sides if you ask me.
Either I am stupid or Mac is bad at discoverability.
I switched from Win10 to macOS recently and had to search the web to find this, so discoverability is certainly an issue. I suppose Apple would rather you just fullscreen a window than maximise a la Windows.
https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/17/keep-menu-bar-visible-mac-fu...
rectangleapp.com enables the classic fullscreen with ctrl+opt+enter (or via snap to top).
> Resize the system font. I find the menu bar at the top too small. The only way to do this on MacOS is to lower the resolution of the entire screen!
- Accessibility -> Display -> Menu bar size
> Change the system font. I know you like Helvetica San Francisco - but I find it a bit too thin to read.
- Seems like you have to change the resolution of your monitor if everything is too small. It won't impact the rest, as applications can still use the native resolution if needed.
> Focus Follow Mouse. I have multiple screens and multiple windows. I want to be able to hover over a new one and start interacting with it without clicking.
- Fair, although scrolling does work. It's just it won't transfer focus.
> Change my mouse button order. On Linux, this is a complex command-line incantation. On MacOS it is impossible. I use a vertical mouse and use my thumb to click. RSI FTW!
- Mouse -> Primary mouse button: left/right. Or use tools
> Read files from MTP devices. If I stick a USB cable between my phone and Linux laptop, I can see the Android files on my laptop. I can open them, move them around, etc. On a Mac I need to install some shonky 3rd party software which rarely works.
- On Android you can set the type of connection when you plug it in (debug/dev/files). I guess that all depends on which Android you have?
> Always on top windows. Sometimes I want to keep the calculator on screen while I type an email. Is that too much to ask?
- There are tools for that or you can script it. Applications that really need it usually have it built in.
> No way to remove UI elements. I don't want a notification icon in the top right of my screen. I prefer having the clock on the left. Trivial in Linux, static in MacOS.
- Correct
> Window snapping. On Ubuntu, I drag a window to the side or to a corner, and it snaps into position. Vital when using multiple windows at once. On Mac there's a half-hearted splitscreen view which only supports horizontal splitting. Useless on a vertical monitor.
- There are tools for this. But yeah the splitscreen really sucks.
> See tooltips. I can't see them on Mac when I have a larger cursor. Weird!
- You found a minor UI issue
> Mount an SSH or NFS drive. In Ubuntu, I get a nice little GUI for picking network shares. Impossible on Mac.
- Sure. There are tools for it, but there's also a connect window. Not as nice though.
> Wobbly Windows! Seriously MacOS. Where's the fun?
- I dunno.. The genie effect?
Yes.
Apart from the Menu bar size it seems like your answer to everything is third party tools, which the author mentions at the beginning of the post.
> - Mouse -> Primary mouse button: left/right. Or use tools
Which tools specifically?
> - On Android you can set the type of connection when you plug it in (debug/dev/files). I guess that all depends on which Android you have?
I don't think this will help for most Android devices since it will try to connect through MTP (which isn't supported by macOS without external tools?).
> Which tools specifically? bettertouchtool
On my xiaomi or galaxy, can't remember, as they are useless since the software isn't updated anymore. It prompts me on how I want to connect when I plug in a USB cable.
> I know you're going to be tempted to reply with "you're using it wrong" - but I'm not. This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isn't my computer - it is Apple's. (OK, OK! It belongs to my employer!)
This comment makes no sense. It's your computer. You can install all these tools if you want.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here - it's literally not their computer, but their employer's. The employer can set policies on what you can or cannot install, whether technically enforced or not. By installing random third-party software, they may be breaching these policies.
And yes, one could possibly get approval from the employer to install them (or maybe not - can you trust that this tool will not steal all your data?), but that is a lot of hassle for fixing such trivial things.
Sure they can set policies. But their policy is to use Apple. So no list of things will help here, as the policy is to not use Ubuntu. Which means he can do exactly nothing with Ubuntu or Windows for that matter.
They could also mandate to not use an external mouse and keyboard. They can be bugged or wireless traffic can be captured
Run Logic X and all the AU's.
For example, in the EDA world it's very common to have Linux/Windows support but not macOS support (eg.: Intel Quartus, Xilinx Vivado, Cadence Virtuoso and others, Mentor Graphics Calibre and others, ...).
They're important to me, moreso than what's in the OP's list.
Seems a bit disingenuous.
Maybe one day.. https://www.darlinghq.org/ :D
Oh and Lightroom, Pixelmator and Excel don't work on Ubuntu.
it arguably runs the best on VMWare Fusion
How silly of me, I should have been upset and angry, and I did not even know it...
Want to use a 15 year old DSLR as a webcam over USB? Nope.
I sent the MBP back. No way I'm putting up with that crap!
That's an issue with your mouse software.
> Want to use a 15 year old DSLR as a webcam over USB
OBS Studio can help or Elgato Cam Link if your DSLR supports HDMI.
So in a way, sure, it’s a problem with my mouse software. The stock one. :)
Err, what software? I can set scroll wheel acceleration on ubuntu, with no additional software.
Using HDMI on my camera has a lower resolution output than USB, plus it has an overlay. Again on Ubuntu, USB just works.
They actually work together pretty well and when they're not at least you will be yelling at whatever Finder/iTunes interface, not a wonky 3rd party software made by some innocent dev who doesn't deserve the bad karma.
Here are some others anyway:
* Record system audio.
* Control HDMI audio volume (have to use Proxy Audio Driver which is somewhat buggy).
* Set mouse acceleration (you used to be able to but they removed the option and now you can only set sensitivity).
* Disable scroll wheel acceleration (needs a paid third party app).
So is MacOS only for people in perfect health?
Wait, doesn't your preferred mouse have exactly that?! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/05/review-evoluent-veritcal-mo...
What is missing from this mapping control?
Are there only 2 classes of people: people in perfect health, and people unable to use their index finger?
Is it that hard to believe some people prefer this behaviour?
Not at all. But it's also really easy to see that giving someone used to one of those behaviours the opposite one - would make them unhappy.
That's my biggest pain when I try to work on a Mac. I bet no-raise-on-focus also sounds insane to the same people, but I only want a window to come to front when I as for it. The article even touches on a simple case of this in "Sometimes I want to keep the calculator on screen while I type an email. Is that too much to ask?"
Using MacOS is such a miserable experience for this exact reason. I'm sure it's fine when using the trackpad but trying to use a mouse on macos is borderline torture.
I fundamentally do not understand why anybody would ever want mouse acceleration. It just makes it harder to use the mouse.
The problem is Mac's acceleration code is pretty awful.
As the other comments have pointed out, SteerMouse works fine at the cost of $20.
Maybe. I mean, I've never wanted to do most of the things he lists as impossible (on either my macOS machines or my Linux machines). But if that's a list of stuff that annoys him when using macOS, I guess they're not "silly" to him.
Since my main daily driver for probably 2/3rds or more of the last three decades has been a Mac, I'm more familiar with it, so things like focus-follows-mouse takes a bit of getting used to when I open up my Pinebook or my RasPi400 - but I gt over myself and get used to it pretty quickly.
People who complain that macOS isn't exactly the same as Ubuntu (or Windows or $randomLinuxDistroDeJour) seem, to me, to just be wanting to complain about stuff.
Every OS has its quirks, doesn’t take more than hour to smooth the rough edges off a new machine if you’re comfortable with the ecosystem. You have to do the same on Ubuntu or Win10 or Pop.