Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

My 2013 MacBook Pro is/was my last Mac. It worked just fine, but I opted out of newer OS X updates because I noticed each successive "upgrade" was making the OS worse, in countless ways, and adding exactly zero improvement I could discern. Change for the sake of change, as far as I'm concerned. I feel the same way about Windows...

I ended up just going out and buying a bunch of old ThinkPads and running OpenBSD and Linux on them. I think I got like five computers for less than the price of a single MacBook Air.

I'm pretty much done with proprietary operating systems because they clearly no longer provide the best experience, from my perspective.

I'm tired of being locked out of software I paid for because I "upgraded" the OS (looking at you, Logic Pro), or vice versa, unable to use new software because I didn't "upgrade" (most new Mac software won't run on my MBP). If I upgrade, I literally throw away a $250 piece of software and have to spend another $250 (or whatever) to use the new version of _that same software_. At least open-source OSes allow me to stay up to date while still having nearly-maximum agency over how the computer works and what software it runs.

I'm tired of my computer doing a ton of stuff I didn't tell it to do. The amount of notifications/nags/etc. on a modern Mac/Windows computer is absolutely mind-boggling to me. The always-online aspect, software-update-checks, "telemetry" and "analytics", phoning home every time I launch a program...

I'm tired of my computer not being a tool for me to use, but rather just a gateway to a bunch of stores and ways I can spend money, with a bit of "productivity" sprinkled on the side. I could go on and on.

Oh, I didn't even touch on the software design/UX aspects. Like Riccardo wrote, it's a worthy of an entire article itself. I could probably spend an entire day documenting/critiquing the degradation of user experience in Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS had a lot further to fall, and indeed has been extra-disappointing because I used to hold it in such high regard :\

I thought the same until I saw my boss with a basic MacBook setup move around his OS, programs, and IDE faster than me. The only difference was he didn’t spend 20 hours setting it up at every new dev job.

Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.

I assume your boss didn't have to install Xcode? Installing Xcode updates is something that I spend way too much time on....

They take forever but it’s only once in a while. If you’re just trying to support newer iOS versions you can just yank them from here instead of updating.

https://github.com/iGhibli/iOS-DeviceSupport

I have a couple friends who live pretty off-grid and the colossal 10gb+ XCode updates was one reason they abandoned Apple ecosystem. It's just not sustainable when your entire month's data allotment isn't enough to download the update for a single piece of software you require to do your work.

I live semi-rurally with really crappy ADSL available. Starlink was a god-send. The number of projects that require extremely good connectivity is really surprising. In particular, I was surprised by how much docker pull struggles on a poor connection.

They don’t actually take that long now. They’re a big download but beyond that it’s only few minutes to extract them.

I have exactly opposite problem - it downloads quickly, but installing takes eternity (via app store).

Bonus points when I leave the computer to let it install; then it thinks it is idle, puts itself into sleep and the install fails. Rinse, repeat.

I don't know, what App store is doing during the install, but using it to manage Xcode has always been extremely irritating.

It's a lot easier to manually download Xcode from Apple's dev portal. The download speed always maxes out my internet connection, and installing is just a question of unpacking the archive, which doesn't make more than a few minutes..

> They’re a big download but beyond that it’s only few minutes to extract them.

That's your privilege speaking. "a big download" (xcode size) can be VERY expensive (relative to typical income) and VERY slow in some countries.

As an industry we kinda suck about assuming that just because we have a lot of bandwidth and cheap data, everyone else does too. We impose a lot of unnecessary cost on poor people in 3rd world countries because of our lazyness with regards to bandwidth, CPU usage, RAM, etc., and or disregard of their financial and infrastructural realities.

Get Xcodes.app. Installing and updating becomes one click. You still have to wait on th download, but it will spaurate your network connection unlike the App Store updates. Installing multiple versions side by side also just works using this method.

I use an a pretty standard install of i3 for my window manager, the OS is almost nothing. At least on my OpenBSD machines, the OS is so simple and well-documented, I can run `ps -aux` and know what literally every process does. This hasn't been the case for me on Mac/Win in like, 15 years or something.

I use Windows at work. It's no faster than when I'm working on my BSD laptop, but I also am not doing extensive development on my laptop. I have done a bit (like building my personal website) and I didn't do anything special to get it going. I have so many different machines, I've got a streamlined setup pretty much down pat, so I can get up and running on anything super quickly. The other thing is: dotfiles. I've got my OpenBSD dotfiles and my Linux dotfiles. Copy from one machine to the new one, done deal.

Oh, I should add, it's definitely not an uphill battle, or at least it sure hasn't been for me. I just checked and I installed this OpenBSD install on Oct 14th 2021, so I just passed the 1-year mark. It's practically unchanged since I got it set up... there's no battle at all, it's the most boring, unintrusive OS I've ever used in my life. The updates are nearly effortless and they don't break my software. I've never been more satisfied with an OS to be honest. (That said I'm not doing music production on this machine, but I'm doing almost all other "everyday" computing tasks and a bit of coding/tinkering, etc.)

> I thought the same until I saw my boss with a basic MacBook setup move around his OS, programs, and IDE faster than me.

Could you tell us how he does it? Every time I have several windows of the same app between two displays, or one window being in the full-screen mode while the other not, I find that I can't move between them quickly or at all with keyboard shortcuts. Can't stop thinking that there must be something I haven't discovered, because the experience is miserable.

Try alt-tab: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

It allows easy switching between _windows_.

This is one of the things I'm not a fan of in Mac OS. CMD + Tab cycles through applications, but not windows within the same application. You can cycle through windows of the same application with [CMD + `]. There are some third party app switchers as well that you could try.

Try command tiles; that's what I use between windows. Also Commands 1 - 10 can switch between tabs on a window

Wow, thanks for that. I never knew that command-digit worked that way. I might not be a typical user, though; my work is mainly done in terminals so the keybindings I use most are those for zsh, tmux, vim, etc.

Agreed. 12 years after switching to Mac, this inconsistency is the one and only thing that still hurts my productivity compared to Windows/Linux.

Control+Left/Right Arrow: switch between full screen apps / desktops

Command+tab: switch between apps

Command+`: switch between windows of the currently open app

Here are my specific annoyances:

> Command+tab: switch between apps

Problem scenario: Open two windows of a single app and place them on two different screens. Now open another app and focus on it. You want to jump between this second app and the last window of the first app, which happens to be on the other screen. Oops, you can't (or at least I can't). Command+tab will focus you on the window that's on the same screen as the window of the other app; not on the window you were focused on last.

> Command+`: switch between windows of the currently open app

Problem scenario 1: Open three windows of a single app. Now, suppose you want to cycle just between two of them (focus on one window, do something, return to the other window, do something else, return to the first window, etc.). Oops, you can't. Command+` will cycle you through all three windows.

Problem scenario 2: Open two windows of a single app, and expand one of them to full screen. Now you can't reach it with Command+`.

Problem scenario 3: Open two windows of a single app, and minimize one of them. Now you can't return to it by simply pressing Command+`. It has become inaccessible from the keyboard.

I agree with you about all of these. To get a little more specific:

>Command+tab problem scenario

You have to use control + arrow key here. I completely agree that this is an annoyance though, and have mostly stopped making my apps full screen because of it.

>Problem scenario 1

Agreed. Ironically, I might consider full-screening or minimizing the window I don't want to loop over xD

>Problem scenario 2

Agreed again. And again, there's control + arrow key.

>Problem scenario 3

Command+` no longer works, but if you hover over the app you want while in the command+tab screen, and then press the down-arrow-key, you can select which window you want to open, and this includes minimized windows. I actually have never used this and just found out about it because your scenario made me curious.

>Oops, you can't (or at least I can't). Command+tab will focus you on the window that's on the same screen as the window of the other app; not on the window you were focused on last.

Yes, and I wouldn't have it any other way. When I create multiple screens / spaces, it's because I want to focus on one or the other.

This comment doesn't track at all. Trying to get a fresh macOS machine to include everything a new hire needs to do basic development work in a Kubernetes environment requires a bunch of Jamf intervention, brew scripts, and dot files. And even then the first week you're constantly needing them to go to their security settings to allow "untrusted" programs to run. Meanwhile someone with a bone stock Fedora Workstation install is 99% of the way there. Yes, you can bikeshed all day get lost in your custom.el, .vimrc, or window manager options, but you can do that on macOS too.

For most dev machines Fedora + vscode gives you RTR productivity while maintaining a respectable level of free-as-in-freedom.

Installing minikube etc in MacOS is just doing it the hard way

Install a linux vm and do k8s there, not on MacOS.

(not to mention you can do without k8s for most of development, I don't know why people like making their lives harder)

I don't develop on MacOS, but having a vm setup as the easy choice doesn't sound nice.

So basically, the advice is to install another OS as a virtual machine to make MacOS usable for actual work? In a thread where people complain about the MacOS usability?

This is strawmanning my comment

I can use (and develop on) MacOS just fine without k8s but if you need it, installing it on a VM is easier

Or you can just install docker with brew and enable k8s afaik

> you can do without k8s for most of development

Completely agree with that, Kubernetes is for deployment, not for development. I have no idea why you would ever need a "local Kubernetes". IMO if you need that, you're doing it wrong.

I've worked with K8s for a few years and not once have I thought "damn a local Kubernetes would be so helpful"

My wording may have confused you. When I said "in a Kubernetes environment" it probably would've been more clear to say "to deploy in a" or "for a Kubernetes environment". So I'm talking about installing things like podman or docker, awscli, tfe, jq, your editor of choice, kubectl, all the stuff you need to push to a pipeline to be deployed on k8s.

I spend the first week just trying to remember how to get osx to ignore cmd-Q. What genius created that chord?

Because of the @ sign ? That and many things regarding Macs are quite odd. When I as a programmer has to google how to enter [ | and ~ I am about the throw the thing out of the window....

That and it is right beside cmd-tab. One fat finger away from force quitting whatever you’re working on. Thank god for auto-save. I’ve lost more work from fat fingering than should be reasonable.

Where they usually are right? Or look down at the keyboard if it's a different layout? Or did you setup a keyboard layout that doesn't match the physical keyboard?

> ...gives you RTR productivity...

Can you please expand "RTR"?

possibly "ready to roll"??

just a guess.

Sorry, ready to run. That acronym is jargon from the RC Car hobby.

20 hours on a Mac pro?

I get 6. I know airs have good battery life but no one I know gets more than 20 on a pro if they're working.

What are you doing to get 20+ on a Mac pro?

Screen brightness all the way down.

iStat Menus has a thing where you can put the current power draw in watts in the menu bar, and it's easy to run at 4-5W with an M1 Pro while just surfing and text editing. With just a couple spikes for compiling, installing, etc. you can very easily hit close to 20 hours for many coding workflows if that's your goal.

I like a bright screen, so I usually get closer to 10 hours, but it charges fast — about 50% in 30 minutes if it's low. (The last 20-30% runs a little slower because battery chemistry.)

Depends on what you're doing. Webdev and I can get 10-15 hours on my 16" M1 Max MBP. Java dev is on the lower end. I also use iStatMenus and pay attention to anything using significant power - a runaway browser tab for example.

I agree, though I'd take a 20+ hour battery life Linux laptop.

  > I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro

does anyone actually get this many hours?

i get at most around 4hrs, but maybe this is because xcode/native dev stresses the system more...?

I get around 10-12 hours on an M1 Pro with docker running in the background.

My girlfriend easily gets around 20 hours on her M1 Air, but she mostly in chrome.

interesting, good to know!

This is a great comment, and touches on a lot of things I find myself ranting[1] about. I've just resigned myself to the fact that every time you update a piece of software, it gets worse rather than better, because the developers are not focused on the user's needs. They're learning a new tech stack for their resume and mastering a new algorithm. The designers are not focused on the user's needs. They're building a slick portfolio. The business guys are not focused on the user's needs. They're monetizing. This is pretty much true for almost all software I've used in the past 10 or so years.

The root problem is that computers and software have shifted from being tools to empower the user to being tools to empower the developer's company. I listened to software requirements discussions back in the 90s, and the questions were all "What does the user need to do?" and "What task is the user trying to accomplish?" and "What features will the user pay for?" Now, you talk to a software product manager, and it's "How do we get the user to do X?" and "We need to channel the user into Y." and "We need to understand how the user uses Z so we can monetize it." Totally reversed mindset. The company already knows what profitable actions are available to the user, so all the research and development is spent on is coercing and funneling the user into those actions. Nobody really cares what the user wants to do.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30852227

> The amount of notifications/nags/etc. on a modern Mac/Windows computer is absolutely mind-boggling

Really? Only notifications I get on my Mac right now are from few programs that I have allowed, mainly for messages and e-mail. That's it. On Windows there are more, but MacOS leaves me alone pretty much most of the time. Perhaps it was different in 2013, but it's not definitely "mind-boggling amount of notifications".

If you don't use Safari the OS will nag you to use Safari until you launch it whenever you open a non-Safari browser. You can temporarily ignore it for a bit but it will come back. And this resets every time Safari is updated. They will also stick a notification badge on system preferences if you're not using iCloud.

I've never had that problem on any machine or OS version.

I do have a pointless notification telling me there's a new version of macOS I could update to, and the reason it's pointless is that my mac is too old for the specific new version of macOS that the notification is trying to convince me to install.

But that thing you're getting with the web browser, I've never had that problem.

It's pretty old and still exists. Since you're on an old macOS it's never going to reset and bug you to try the new Safari because it's never updated.

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-osx-try-safari-promotion....

My personal mac is old, but the OS is newer than that link.

My current work mac (and all previous work macs back to when my current personal mac was new) have never had the bug you're talking about — install chrome, make default, never get nagged.

I use MacOS Monterey. Never been nagged by OS to use safari instead of my current browser. Safari does have a "set me as default" nag I cant disable, the few times I've launched it - but this is in the browser window, not a notification.

Never logged into iCloud and have never seen this notification badge.

This is just false. I'm using Firefox and have never been asked to use Safari instead.

I haven't had this problem ever, and that goes back to when Safari was first released. Yes, on a new machine, first launch of another browser... after that I click the button to make that the default browser and then never happens again. And I've gone through a LOT of machines since Safari was released.

>'m tired of being locked out of software I paid for because I "upgraded" the OS (looking at you, Logic Pro), or vice versa, unable to use new software because I didn't "upgrade" (most new Mac software won't run on my MBP). If I upgrade, I literally throw away a $250 piece of software and have to spend another $250 (or whatever) to use the new version of _that same software_. At least open-source OSes allow me to stay up to date while still having nearly-maximum agency over how the computer works and what software it runs.

Yes, as long as it's available, which it mostly isn't. What would be your Logic replacement options in Linux? Reaper is OK for tracking and effects, but doesn't even come close to the built-in stuff Logic has, and BitWig looks like it will probably soon go the subscription way.

Ardour is probably the most popular DAW in Linux. It's probably what I would use if I wanted to produce some music in Linux. Yeah, I have a pretty big collection of old Macs because, well, if I didn't, I'd be throwing away a good couple $thousand worth of software (because it won't run on newer machines)... pretty disappointing. Luckily, other than Logic Pro 9, I bought most of that stuff while it was still "pay for it once and use it forever, even without the internet", unlike today where everything is based on online-activated DRM that guarantees one day your software will stop working.

Is there any good solution for iOS, Mac development on Linux ? since I also prefer linux. Using cloud macs can become slow due to latency and price can add up over time.

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