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Comment by streblo | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that some of what made MacOS great for developers is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS. Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos. I hope Apple takes this customer segment seriously and reverses course here, but I'm not super hopeful.

The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.

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MacOS is a great platform but I find all their apps terrible. Luckily there is a very active development community and I don't have to use any of them.

  * Finder -> Path Finder
  * Spotlight -> Alfred
  * Stage Manager/Snapping -> Moom
  * Safari -> Chrome/Firefox
  * Mail/Calendar/Contacts -> Outlook
  * Photos -> Google Photos
  * Maps -> Google Maps
  * Weather -> Weather Channel
  * System Sound -> SoundSource
  * System Screen Shots -> Clean Shot X
  * System Menu Bar -> Bartender
  * Terminal -> iTerm2
  * Preview (I actually use this one)

I've never been able to get a good grip on what people find bad about Finder. Once View > Show Path Bar and View > Show Status Bar have been selected and current folder searching has been enabled in Preferences I don't find it any worse than Windows Explorer, GNOME Files, or any of the numerous derivations of GNOME Files (Nemo, Thunar, etc).

In my case I just wanted a button on the Finder toolbar that opens up the current folder in the default terminal.

I have [right-click/control-click] > Services > New Terminal at Folder

Is that standard now, or did I add it long ago and forget?

That is standard now. It wasn't when a started using Path Finder. I still find it slower than just having the button in the toolbar.

I keep terminal.app in the tool bar and just drag and drop the folder on to the dock where the terminal app is

There's at least one Finder extension that can add such a button.

https://github.com/Ji4n1ng/OpenInTerminal

I have something that serves a similar purpose - a shell script that calls out to AppleScript to get the path of the most recently used Finder window and returns it as a string:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    
    ####################
    # Description: Get the path of the most recently used Finder window
    # Author: Ancapistani
    # Version: 1.0.0
    ####################
    
    osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
              -e "if (${1-1} <= (count Finder windows)) then"\
              -e "get POSIX path of (target of window ${1-1} as alias)"\
              -e 'else' \
              -e 'get POSIX path of (desktop as alias)'\
              -e 'end if' \
              -e 'end tell';

I have this saved as `fpwd` in my shell.

the problem with such approach is it leaves terminal item in dock. I use warp terminal and it is really annoying.

You can drag the folder into the Terminal!

wow i had no idea these things could be done. i've just suffered in silence for years. thanks for the tips!

One problem I have with the finder is there is no "loading files" animation when browsing through folders. So if open a folder and it looks empty, its not clear if it is really empty, or if the finder is still trying to get a folder listing. Hard to look through and organize/delete files on external and network drives.

There is a spinner on the bottom right corner to indicate that it's still scanning for files. It's super subtle and easy to miss though.

The most ridiculous missing feature is there’s no refresh button for the current folder. Sometimes to show new files created by an external process I have to relaunch the whole finder process just to have my files appear as it caches the stale view

That's a gripe I share, but I run into it so infrequently that it's not much of a bother. Most likely when browsing network shares and such, which I tend to use something like Transmit or Forklift for instead.

Finder should show changes immediately except on certain external filesystems. It gets kernel events on directory and file changes (the same mechanism Spotlight and Time Machine use).

This bites me on fake FAT filesystems over USB for hardware development kits, and I usually just turn those features off. The heuristics there are often terrible, and I'd rather create a build system that writes a new image, instead of doing manual drag-and-drops.

One thing that really makes Finder terrible is I can't copy path easily like I can in windows and even going to certain folder requires steps like clicking on Go To Folder etc.

Gnome File and Finder both have such issue. Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.

If you enable the path bar, you can right click on the path bar and "Copy as Pathname" on whatever is down there (which will be the current folder if nothing is selected, or whatever is selected).

If the path bar is showing a folder, you can right click it and select "Open in terminal".

osx has Ctrl+Shift+G to quickly paste a path to go to

There is a keyboard shortcut for “go to folder” which my fingers know but my mind does not (on mobile at the moment).

The resulting path input modal even supports tab completion.

> Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.

The Finder has an equivalent with Command-Shift-G, and if that key shortcut is too cumbersome it (along with all other Mac menu items) can be re-bound in System Preferences under the Keyboard prefpane.

Most of the things mentioned in this comment chain are easily discoverable in the Finder's menus… it really pays to peruse menus in Mac apps when searching for a function.

FYI, holding option key with a directory or file selected and choosing "copy" will copy the path to the selected item. With nothing selected, it will copy the path to the location of the open finder window.

The copy operation (⌘C) has an optional variant (⌥⌘C) which copies the pathnames to the clipboard as text rather than copying file references.

This will copy either the directory (if no selection) or the selected file(s).

If you enable the path bar, I believe this is also a copyable element.

Finally, dropping a file or directory into a plain text control that cannot take file or folder references (like this HN comment box) will fall back to the path name.

The main job of the Finder is finding files. Unfortunately the interface for doing that is the worst I've seen in any OS. Let's compare it with Windows 3.1's File Manager (which was the first GUI file manager I used).

1. Defaults to the columnar format. It's crazy - to move from a parent to child you've to move the mouse the whole width of the column. Whereas in Windows 3.1 File Manager, you'd have to move less than 10 pixels.

2. Now you could switch to the List View. But in Windows 3.1 File Manager, I can see a tree of directories on the left, and the directory contents on the right. That IMO is way cleaner than a single pane. Navigating to a child directory in the right pane also synchronizes the tree on the left pane. I can't be sure about the last one though because Win 3.1 was nearly 3 decades back, but I that's how it works today.

I remember using a version of Explorer that had collapsable hierarchical navigation on the left, as well as similar non-filesystem programs with a similar design and do not recall being fond of it. Especially on smaller screens it was easy for the left pane to become too small to fit the names of deeply nested directories, and then become too wide when collapsing them. To me at least that style is somewhat awkward and fiddly.

Off the top of my head:

* Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.

* Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.

* Renaming multiple files is a chore. You expect to rename a file, then press tab to highlight the next file, and begin typing. Instead, you... do some combination of enter, tab, then enter again, except it never quite works the way you expect, and sometimes the file moves because the sorting changes after you pressed enter the first time, and for some reason pressing tab actually moves you to the next folder.

* Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.

* For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.

* In general, the number of contextual commands you just have to discover by trial and error, or by looking them up on the internet, because they are hidden in the UI. Even the right-click menu doesn't list things like "open in slideshow", because the right click menu has a secret menu of its own which you have to press [cmd] to see.

* There is no preview panel visible by default, that's another option you have to turn on, like showing the file path. This stuff should all be on by default.

* You have to view file info in a separate window.

* It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.

> Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.

That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.

> Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.

> For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.

Adding a modifier to these functions helps prevent accidental irritating (opening 500 selected files) or potentially destructive (moving selected files to the trash) actions due to fat fingering, which is a particularly likely occurrence on laptops where edge keys like delete and return are easy to accidentally hit just moving around one's laptop. The accidental opening by hitting return one is something I've done several times over the years and it's never not infuriating.

On Windows, deleting a file moves it to the Recycle Bin which is functionally equivalent to what macOS does. In fact off the top of my head I don't know of a modern desktop environment that just directly deletes files without recourse.

> It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.

Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.

> That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.

Ironically, holding down "Option" to see hidden menu items is not discoverable at all. Most people will only ever do it by accident. The point is that anything commonly desired should not be hidden like that.

There use to be MacWorld and MacUser for discovering these tips, conveniently scattered around the Math Dept tea room, or a very reasonable subscription. These days I've no idea how people discover these tips. TikTok? By chance on Twitter? Searching would be impossible.

Apple still publishes a manual for macOS: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac

There's also the 'Help' menu in Finder that has the manual, tips, and menu search functionality.

> Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.

That Finder and the desktop are a single process is an implementation detail that should be hidden from UI mechanisms like this.

Either way, it would be a strange experience to hit Command-Q to “quit” (close all windows) the Finder only to land right back in the Finder (desktop) again.

> That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open

So, not discoverable at all.

You want Apple to break a lot of things Mac users are used to because you’re not used to them. You are clearly a Windows user and would benefit from buying a Mac user guide. Do they still update The Macintosh Bible? That sort of thing would help you a lot.

"This stuff should all be on by default" is also completely eschewing the notion that Apple's stuff is the result of decades of user-experience testing by now. It's that way because Apple users expect it to be that way.

If you want it different, you want Linux or a BSD.

I was replying to a comment asking what people found bad about Finder. I replied with some things I find bad about Finder. If the response is "yer doin' it wrong" then I don't know how to proceed: what could possibly be wrong with Finder if it’s current formulation is defined as exactly the way it should be?

I guess I could also question the proposition that Apple doesn't change things people like about Macs. I could list a few examples of them doing that, too.

Thanks for the suggestion that I read a book.

Most of your criticisms can be explained by unfamiliarity with longstanding Mac conventions. But this is fair:

> Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.

The default behavior used to be great, ~10 years ago (extremely snappy search scoped to the current folder). The change to searching the whole computer with significant lag was an absurd and mysterious regression.

It might be worth excluding certain directories from Spotlight to prevent it from indexing node_modules etc which tend to be massive but mostly useless from a Spotlight search perspective.

It used to be snappy for the whole system, then it took a horrible regression.

Your response is fair, but would you agree that "it's a long-standing convention" is not a defense against "I don't like it"?

The claim was that these are “bad”. But they’re not inherently any better or worse, just a conflicting convention, mostly dating back to the 1980s.

It’s like the difference between US vs. UK spelling conventions. A British person saying “Americans are bad at spelling words” is just trolling.

I’ve been surprised by all the behaviors you listed after migrating from Linux and Windows to Mac years ago, but honesty this is just a different logic and it only took a few days to get used to it. Except for your point about search where I still don’t understand the logic today.

> Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.

Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste? Cut content exists only on the pasteboard. If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).

This is why they went with the select-and-copy and select-and-move operations instead, and mapped them onto the copy/paste system. A true 'cut' would be too destructive.

> Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste?

I'd expect that nothing will happen, Cut will wait for paste operation. It's not delete, where content is gone immediately. If no paste will follow, then Cut is not executed. Cut marks file for move operation, if no move is executed, then nothing will be lost.

> If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).

We're talking about files here, not text. Text behaves differently. I'd argue that Cut operation as it is in text editors, is not logical but it is what it is and people are used to it. For deleting there's Delete operation, Cut should not be equal to Delete in some occasions.

It’s incredibly unintuitive to have a command called “cut” that actually does nothing. I’m very thankful Apple has not implemented that.

You are arguing that "copy and paste" and "cut and paste" in the context of a file manager actually behave as "mark, then copy" and "mark, then move" operations.

Well, that's exactly how Finder works, isn't it? Cmd+C marks files, Cmd+V copies them, Cmd+Opt+V moves them.

Fair question! Windows does it pretty much the same way under the hood: the file is not affected until you paste it in the new location. If you never complete the paste, the cut command does nothing. The difference is the interaction maps to another, better-known one that is much easier to discover if you've used a text editor or word processor. I recall the default Ubuntu file manager working the same way, but I don't have an installation running at the moment.

On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.

Also, the Mac way lets the user change their mind between copying the file or moving it without first navigating back to the source and restarting the process from scratch, since that decision sits on the pasting end.

In my mind the only advantage the Windows way has is that it belongs to the more popular platform.

I occasionally go back to Windows. I am in hell for a while. If I had to use Windows to drive a car, I'd wreck it before the mindset would reload.

If the preference to use System 7-style spatial Finder worked consistently I’d be happy. Unfortunately new media (DMGs, USB drives, network connections etc) still open in browser windows by default. I wonder how many times I’ve pressed cmd-option-T over the years.

If you don't have :

* Keyboard Maestro (automation) * BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience) * Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world) * PopClip. * Fantastical (calandar app)

You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.

Huh, I strongly prefer the Apple option in all those cases. Usually when I'm on other platforms I wish I had Apple's programs there (OMG, the "office"-type apps like Pages and Numbers when I'm on Linux especially—plus Preview, of course, which is excellent). Apple's first-party programs are a huge part of why I'd have trouble leaving the platform—not so much because of lock-in, but because I find them excellent compared to most of the competition, free or commercial, and would hate to have to switch to the programs I have to use when I'm on those platforms.

I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.

I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.

I agree a lot here - Apple's first party apps are a big part of what keeps me on macOS & in Apple's ecosystem. Preview alone is a superb app, Terminal.app is fast and reliable (I have had a lot of performance issues with iTerm2), Mail.app is my preferred mail client (I haven't found any other that I like as much on any platform!), Safari is my browser of choice (although I wish it could still run uBlock Origin), Keynote & Pages are by far my preference over Powerpoint/Word or Slides/Docs.

There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.

I use Adguard as a replacement for uBlock Origin on Safari, which works well!

Have you tried Kitty? It blows iTerm2 and Terminal.app out of the water in performance. It's also feature rich, if you have wild terminal feature needs. I'm mostly in it for the speed, though.

You prefer the default apple screenshotting app over clean shot x? Really? Have you even tried clean shot?

I for one have long since memorised all the keyboard shortcuts for screenshots. And for everything else there’s command-shift-five.

I haven’t personally used clean shot X, but a tool has to be way, way, way better than the built-in default to get me to change. It doesn’t matter what clean shot X can do better; clean shot X loses because se it isn’t going to be on every Mac I sit in front of.

How is it better?

Marking up images, being able to blur out certain areas of an image, OCR, Visual indicator of keys pressed in screen recording mode. Cleanshot is really just a screenshot tool with some minor but useful editing tools.

OCR's built in to macOS these days. Works pretty well. Would have been a notable feature not that long ago, though, true.

Better screen recording would be nice but I do it rarely enough that Quicktime is fine. If I did it more I'd definitely have to find some other solution.

All the marking up and such—well, there are many reasons that Preview is possibly my favorite single program on Macs.

cmd+shift+4 is all I ever use. Select area, screenshot goes to clipboard, done.

Have you tried Orion? WebKit based, privacy focused + chrome or firefox extensions. It is my main browser, and works for almost everything I do. My last employer used Office365 and using Orion didn't work well, but that was the only site I had to use another browser.

https://browser.kagi.com/

Outlook is the troll pick on this list.

Everything about it verifiably worse than the separate apps Apple ships with macOS, from data storage to integration.

That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...

Fantastical is the Apple Calendar replacement that should have been mentioned.

It was until it went subscription, and not even at reasonable price imho.

> That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...

10.4 Tiger

They started to ruin the iCal user interface in 10.5 Leopard.

In general, 2006 was peak Mac. When it was Apple main product, before iPhone.

I hear this a lot. Or that Leopard or Snow Leopard was peak Mac. That part of the debate doesn't interest me.

What does interest me is that pre-Lion software is well understood. The behaviors and expectations and commands are re-implementable. Isn't it time someone just made SwiftUI-Tiger or somesuch?

Heck yeah, I love using my 10.4.11 Macs. 10.6.8 as well, of course. To me those two were real high points in the life of OS X, thus far. The computers themselves were still super cool and had a lot of character, too -- another thing that has gradually faded over time, IMO.

I would disagree with this.

Mac Mail is probably the worst application I've used on Mac (+ the one on the iOS is not far behind). Search is atrocious - like unusably so, it constantly has syncing issues (even with iCloud) when trying to get new mail, it's incredibly slow, and I don't care for the design.

Try Raycast instead of Alfred, it's pretty good!

Raycast has a lot going for it, but it has one showstopper flaw for me: too much of it is slow, multi-step, wizard style, when I want the equivalent of a GUI shell one-liner, like Alfred.

Preview is awful but you actually use it. Forgive me. My Twitter personality is showing.

Thanks.

Outlook??

I was agreeable until that point. Outlook did/does more to ruin email and discussion on the internet than any other app in that realm.

Some of those apps are the worst for battery life, privacy and speed of work.

To each their own..

I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.

I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.

Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.

These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.

I absolutely agree. I had to use Windows as my daily driver for a few weeks at work, and I missed a lot Apple Notes and Preview. They are fantastically well designed and implemented applications.

Apple notes is that like the notes app on iPhone? I use sticky note on windows and it syncs to my notes App on my phone and iPad.

It is much more than a sticky notes feature set. It is a full blown notes system that allows you to create notes organised by tags or folders. Each note may contain rich text, images, Apple Pencil sketches or just about anything. They are synced by iCloud to other Apple devices(iPhone, iPad). My wife and I both being part of the Apple walled garden, we share a few common notes like “to do for home”, “things to know” etc and keep adding relevant things like screenshots or copy paste important emails. We each get notified if the other adds anything. They are all indexed and searchable.

I'm quite sick of having a laptop that heats up on my lap especially in summer so considering getting a Macbook Pro 14" M2, and more curious if all my stick notes will sync over so I don't lose them as I have them on my iPhone/iPad at the moment.

Can’t comment on sticky notes as I haven’t used them. But have the 14” MBP with M1Pro, and it is easily the best portable computer I’ve had. It is great for work. I never even carry my power brick with me because at work I connect to a monitor via USB-C and it charges the thing. While on the go, believe it or not my phone charger charges the Mac albeit slowly. The Mac itself lasts seemingly forever so it eliminated my battery anxiety. Totally worth it.

I have a brand new MacBook Pro M1 14" since a few days and I can also say this is the best laptop I've ever had. Coming from an Intel-based MacBook Pro 15", I've been hesitating between the 14" and 16" versions. My 15" was a bit too big and heavy, and I was concerned about that with the 16". On the other hand, I was concerned the 14" display could be too small. It happens this is actually a really good tradeoff. The 14.2" display is actually slightly bigger than the 13.3" display on MacBook Airs, which is making it comfortable enough on the go. And as mentioned by the parent, the autonomy is amazing.

Makes me kinda excited to get the M2 14" when available.

Thanks for the valuable feedback, good to know its worth it.

Same here. I've been a mac user for about 14 years now but never bought into all the Apple software. Just never cared for any of it. Before that I used Windows and Dos for many years. The reasons I left that behind me are still true: Windows is worse. Much worse. The endless mandatory reboots, the bundled crapware, the instability, dreadful performance, etc.

I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.

It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.

I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.

I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.

The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.

* System Dock -> uBar (my favorite of all)

I will have to give that one a look. I currently just hide the dock and never access it.

Haven't tried moom, but Rectangle is fast and simple to snap windows left, right in whatever size increment you want: https://rectangleapp.com/

Saying that you'd rather use Outlook than Mail kind of makes your entire comment suspicious. Outlook is the poster child for over-engineered software. I could write all day about how objectively bad it is, from every angle. It was my belief that no one used Outlook by choice, but, hey, I guess there are, in fact, 7 billion people on the planet, and the law of averages is at work here.

> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.

Same here. I (for reasons) set up new Linux distros with abandon and just go with Ubuntu and its defaults (swapping control and CapsLock is mostly all I change).

The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...

There's always icloud.com

Nope doesn’t at all provide the same functionality. I would love it if it did though.

Yeah, feels like the obvious option missing. I don't use Ubuntu any more, but it's the popular Linux, so it serves plenty of people just fine. Makes it the sane generic recommendation without letting my personal preference slip in.

Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.

Windows also has some unfortunate papercuts like font rendering that's still optimized for super low rez displays all these years later, with bad hinting and kerning. Seriously, this drives me nuts. It's better when DPI scaling is above 1.0 but it's still not as good as that of macOS or any Linux desktop environment.

Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.

I have been using HIDPI displays on Windows for years and have zero issues with the font rendering. It is _different_ from macOS and Linux, sure, but I can’t see any reason to diss it today.

I've always found Windows's font rendering to be subjectively "off" in a way I couldn't really articulate. I'm not enough of a typography expert to explain what I'm seeing. Text display just seems beautiful on Mac and a half-assed afterthought on Windows.

My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?

WSL not deeply integrated? When was the last time you used it? I can't imagine a use case where you need your core OS to be posix based, and WSL with whatever linux VM isn't good enough as a dev environment. VScode in windows with WSL is the perfect dev combo.

I don't need to have my OS be posix-based, but I do need it to have a decent auto-tiling setup and a checksummed filesystem with fast snapshots and rollbacks.

by checksummed filesystem, do you mean a filesystem that maintains integrity? don't all modern file systems do that? I have little to no idea about how mac and windows compare with snapshots. I have never needed that in my OS. Do you use that for test environment replication or something?

I mean btrfs or zfs. Just like auto-tiling, once you have it you'll have no idea how you lived without it.

suppose I recreated my desktop with zfs rather than ext4. What wonders could I expect? :)

The main ones I use are:

* make automatic snapshots that you can recover data from as necessary, and have them be created every time the system updates (I've needed to use this once)

* have those automatic snapshots be auto synced to my NAS, creating a backup (also used this once when my hardware failed)

> don't all modern file systems do that?

Define this.

But the simple, practical answer is no.

Practical answer? when was the last time you heard about someone having file corruption on their local OS due to using a bad filesystem technology? I've been an enterprise developer for storage companies for more than 15 years, I'm very familiar with different file systems, and I've never cared what filesystem was on my local PC because it's basically irrelevant with modern tech. I feel like I'm being trolled on technical points that have nothing to do with the topic I was trying to discuss. I guess I should have learned my lesson that even on HN, don't feed the trolls.

> when was the last time you heard about someone having file corruption on their local OS due to using a bad filesystem technology?

Quite frequently. It's not that uncommon at all. Bad disk cables, defective disks, etc it's not all that rare. The filesystem is in a place to either detect and/or correct these problems. Only some do.

> I've never cared what filesystem was on my local PC because it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.

I'm glad you've been lucky but silent file corruption is not an "irrelevant" problem as data densities increase.

Filesystems with data checksums include btrfs, ZFS, ReFS, NILFS. But very commonly used filesystems, xfs, ext4, NTFS, APFS, exFAT do not have this feature (some of them do have metadata support).

> it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.

Unnecessary e-peening aside - Why do you think this is the case? What specifically about modern tech makes it irrelevant?

> WSL not deeply integrated?

Been a few months since I last checked but there didn't seem to be a way to get to your WSL (VM? Instance?) from outside the windows environment (ie via ssh) without setting up a bunch of firewall rules using Powershell to query the IP and create the rules from there. (Except that doesn't always work correctly because PS seems to get a different IP because it's starting up a new WSL? I dunno, I gave up a while back.)

Fixed IP is a solved problem by now. See https://superuser.com/a/1715206/41259

> I can't imagine a use case where you need your core OS to be posix based, and WSL with whatever linux VM isn't good enough as a dev environment

Maybe as "web dev environment" it is enough, but this is the main reason why I absolutely detest these "cmdline/scripting only inside a sandboxed VM" approach that the major commercial platforms seem to be trying to sell us these days.

It really is not enough for general purpose computing. I want true integration with the operating system, not sandboxed crap. I want to be able to do almost anything the host OS is capable of doing from my command line, including receiving and sending SMS, filtering incoming phone calls with a script, renaming files en-masse (from _other_ programs, not just files from inside the sandbox itself), recording and playing sounds, access hardware that I have plugged in like USB serial ports or whatever, access hardware that I have not plugged in like diagnosing bluetooth device pairing, be able to fully backup/restore the "host OS" to my medium of choice, partition and format external OR internal filesystems, etc.

I want to do this stuff quite frequently and WSL is just NOT cut for that. The same applies to ChromeOS/Android sandboxed linux approaches. They are a joke designed for the user who is mostly going to simply run ssh into a real machine from within such a sandbox or perhaps run some programs that were so portable they already had win32 versions to begin with. This was not the case for macOS which until very recently was still a very command line centric OS.

Try Fedora. My iMac from 2011 is still running strong on that. Same on my XPS 13. Haven't needed to do any special configuration yet.

I'm confused. How is Stage Manager a "developer-hostile move"?

I'm talking more about things like you can't use apps that haven't been blessed by Apple without jumping through hoops, you can't easily install some third party OSS without installing XCode clutils, for a while you seemed not to be able to use sudo without booting into recovery mode and flipping some switch. Those kinds of things are 'developer-hostile' in my mind because they just make your life harder as a developer, and to what end?

I haven't upgraded and used Stage Manager yet so I don't have any opinion on it.

You can use sudo, you just can’t modify OS files without disabling SIP which you can do from recovery mode.

This seems fine to me. The problem is regular users follow some instructions that say paste in to the terminal and then the OS asks for a password like it always does, and now you have malware embedded in your OS.

With the new model, you’d have to guide the user through getting in to recovery mode which is either too confusing or sets off alarm bells for the user.

As a developer I can’t really see why you’d want to touch these OS files unless you are hacking on the OS itself and at that point you should be smart enough to know how to turn it off

> Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS.

Cygwin.

> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.

Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?

Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.

I think if I were to try to make any DE work the way I'd like it to it would have to be my full-time job for a while for there to be any hope of it being finished any time this decade. The list of changes is huge irrespective of the DE used as a starting point, and the changes large enough that upstream probably wouldn't want them which brings the overhead of maintaining a fork.

Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.

is cygwin still usable right now? With e.g. docker? I would have assumed WSL is way better at this point at giving a true native env.

Time is very precious. As someone who's done the investment into both desktop Linux (Openbox) and MacOS, the level of effort required to get something useful is way different. MacOS has a very gentle learning curve so it's easy to switch and be back in business, getting work done. Linux OTOH is less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff. I've got the exact right monitor setup I want on Linux, but it required learning xrandr and writing a shell script because none of the GUI frontends could get it right. With MacOS I kinda just have to accept whatever it gives me as good enough. Thankfully it usually is though.

Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.

Enter the terminal. Don't leave. It's basically the same everywhere.

Once you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop.

Sometimes I seriously suspect the only things keeping me from doing that are SublimeText and Pixelmator. I have not yet gotten annoyed enough with macOS to relearn all my finger macros that've been driving Sublime for a decade and getting up to speed with a different text editor, or to have leaned how to drive Gimp well enough to be reasonably able toi use it to replace Pixelmator in a productive fashion. Oh, and _maybe_ OmniGraffle, but I'm not sure I've even opened that yet this year.

Sublime has a Linux build which works perfectly! I switched from MacOS to Ubuntu as a daily driver two years ago.

Keyboard shortcuts generally were the biggest annoyance, however I can’t speak to Sublime shortcuts specifically, as I have all my editors set to use Emacs style bindings.

Ooooh, thanks. I am 100% going to check that out. (Hope there's a build that'll run on my Pinebook...)

I use it on mine regularly :)

>Once you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop.

I mean, frankly... no.

I live in the terminal on my Mac, but I still need a browser to deal with everything else. The battery life on a MacBook alone will kick the everloving hell out of most non-Apple laptops currently. Scrolling is always smooth, and I don't even hear a fan these days with the M1.

Living in the terminal on macOS affords you relative consistency; while yes, Apple has changed things in releases (or held back due to licensing stuff), it all mostly works as expected and will generally not break between OS releases. That's the important bit here.

MacOS keyboards are dire though.

I wish the Thinkpad wasn't so awful. Unfortunately, the screen, silicon AND power management software of a Thinkpad + Linux is miles behind MacOS.

13th gen Intel is quite competitive with M1/M2 in perf per watt.

Peak vs idle is the question.

I haven't seen 13th gen extremely closely. It'll get very, very complicated though.

The performance per watt at the top of the voltage frequency curve for the performance cores, is very different to the voltage frequency curve for the idle cores at base clock.

Especially at low queue depth, infrequent operations.

Don’t share the same opinion. The keyboards they use now are the best I have had on any laptop.

Layout, rather than switch, I should have said.

ThinkPad + Windows + WSL. You are welcome.

Wait, what are you configuring? Just install Fedora or Ubuntu, install your favorite IDE, and go.

Why is POSIX a strict requirement?

> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

Exactly why I prefer Windows development to macOS and Linux!

That seems backwards. Linux distro's come with mostly reasonable defaults and a decent set of apps. Windows PCs come with loads of crapware and no useful apps to speak of.

Windows 11 is full of Microsoft crap I’ll give you that.

But configuring a brand new MacBook or new Linux install for development is pure hell. It’s a bloody nightmare. Linux is, for better and worse, an endless stream of configuration. The upside is you CAN configure it. The downside is you have to, constantly.

> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

I was responding to this statement. Do you want constantly and carefully configure your machine? Use Linux and be happy! Do you want something that works out of the box? Windows is pretty darn good.

I do game development which is Windows through and through. YMMV.

I teach a software development undergraduate programme. We have our students use Linux for all development. We have them do no configuration whatsoever, unless you count installing a couple of packages from the package manager and a few vscode extensions. Works just fine out of the box.

> Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos.

Could you give some examples?

I think what happens is for basically anyone trying an OS that isn’t their daily driver, they hit a few things which don’t work the same or that they don’t quite understand and immediately come to the conclusion that it’s bad/broken/hostile/unproductive.

I’m a long time linux user and just switched to macOS for work at the start if the year and in that first month I could rattle out a long list of complaints but now I don’t really care about any of that. Most of it was just me applying my expectations of Linux on to another OS. When there are other ways to skin the cat and none of them are really better than the others.

There are also some things that are actually just bad like full screen mode but that you learn to deal with to the point you forgot it was even bad. I can think of these kinds of things for every OS.

> is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS

I have a sudden flashback of 2012

Developer != UNIX.

Apple is still great for Apple ecosystem developers.

Installing a compiler on linux is certainly easier than doing so on osx.

"xcode-select --install" installs llvm and clang. Seems pretty easy to me!

Now install a cross compile toolchain…

Whoa look at those goalposts moving

Since most developers using osx do app development… they need it.

Apple really should just phase out MacOS and replace it with iOS and a touchscreen interface (including for desktop systems). They can call it being "brave", and if you don't like it, they can tell you that you're just using it wrong.

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