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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

A ferrari with square wheels, that is a good one.

A UNIX descendent of NextSTEP tooling, versus the distribution of the month in GNU/Linux world, preaching they will get the desktop this year, for 20 plus years, and the road for gaming relies on pretending to be Windows.

Treat macOS as Mac OS, not as a Linux distribution.

A proper set of UI frameworks, not stuck in pre-history C and C++ workloads or even worse Electron, a 3D graphics API that doesn't require one to become a graphics driver programmer to draw a triangle, proper attention to UI/UX,...

"They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

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I don't need anyone to tell me about the "year of the Linux desktop". I have been using it exclusively since 2018 and earlier at work. The only advice I have to people is to stay the hell away from Ubuntu. That distribution is so bad and it gives people an absurdly bad impression of the Linux Desktop experience. Thanks to snaps, running IntelliJ, Firefox and the JVM application you are developing will consume 16GB of RAM. The coercive update culture with forced application restarts basically downgrades the experience to something as bad as Windows.

On my desktop with 32GB RAM I rarely get above 12GB with a ridiculous amount of applications.

Pity that 98% of the desktop computing hasn't noticed it, as per Valve survey average.

I’m paid to develop apps which deploy on Linux containers. macOS is uniquely incapable of providing a good development experience for that use case. Even Windows with WSL2 is leaps and bounds ahead.

Then don't buy a Mac, that simple.

WSL 2 is a Hyper V VM for running Linux distributions, while WSL emulated Linux syscalls.

Surely some of that salary can be used to make OEMs selling Linux hardware happy, instead of buying Apple and then complaining macOS isn't yet another Linux distribution.

If you want WSL like experience on Mac, VMWare is happy to provide it to you.

It is like complaining using Playstation SDK isn't fit to target Nintendo Switch, go figure!

The issue isn't that a MacBook is the wrong tool for the job, it's precisely that it's demonstrably capable of being the right tool for the job but Apple deliberately chooses to make it useless in an attempt to ring fence products within their ecosystem.

The comparison to the console world is apt as it mirrors Apple's attempts to lock their platform down, much like the console ecosystem. Thankfully the bootloader is unlocked and it's unlikely that's going to change.

Remember that the MacBook pro is a device marketed at professionals looking to do the work of their profession on their laptops. By "professional", it appears that Apple means "multimedia editors". If you are a software engineer, you are no longer the target audience for the MBP lineup.

Buying a device for Apple ecosystem developers and pretending it is a Linux distribution, is precisely holding it wrong.

Professional Developer !== Doing stuff on Linux distributions.

Want Linux? Buy Linux.

Why are you so aggressively defending a trashy product? I can't reliably alt+tab on a MacOS to switch between windows and apps, there are hidden shortcuts, 3 modifier keys make it a nightmare to wrap my head around shortcuts, window tiling is trash (thanks for the save Rectangle), iTunes randomly popping up when I use my BT headset, applications need to be "quit", closing just isn't enough, but some apps quit when their last window is closed, weird! Stage manager, virtual desktop, a broken dock. It's a nightmare. MS Windows have invented such a cool way of switching between multiple windows of the same app, doesn't matter if those are minimised or not.

Oh, and Macs have a hide and minimise feature, wow! Just a cluster fuck entirely. Gazillion different ways of installing applications and then managing all those updates separately (a lot like Windows in that regard). These are all issues I face on a regular basis, haven't even dived into developer experience.

> I can't reliably alt+tab on a MacOS to switch between windows and apps

Why do you expect alt+tab to perform identically to the Windows version such?e

> window tiling is trash

How's the built-in window tiling on Windows?

> applications need to be "quit"

...okay? yes?

> but some apps quit when their last window is closed, weird

Within Apple's own programs, you see this behavior? Or are you speaking of third-party apps that may be disrespecting the established paradigm?

> Oh, and Macs have a hide and minimise feature, wow! Just a cluster fuck entirely.

Yes, and I love the hide feature.

Seriously, there's plenty to complain about in Mac land these days. There's a definite trajectory and I don't at all like where it's headed. But all of your complaints (other than possibly the one regarding iTunes), essentially boil down to "this isn't Windows". That's fine, go use what you want. What's baffling is when you call something garbage, because it doesn't match your preferences especially when it matches those of others.

> If you are a software engineer, you are no longer the target audience for the MBP lineup.

If you are a software engineer developing for Linux.

Seriously. I don't get the sentiment here, at all. It's like buying a (insert non-microsoft platform here) computer and complaining it sucks to develop Windows apps on it.

???

Or you know, take off the square wheels and put some round wheels on.

Linux OEM vendors will gladly provide them, specially for those into Pimp My Ride kind of experience, plenty of wheels to chose from.

> Then don't buy a Mac, that simple.

If only. It was not my choice to make, it was my employer’s.

Difficult debating a fan's love with logic, right? This person is so aggressively justifying the MacOS decisions

That depends a lot on what you do. People writing servers on the JVM can do all their development locally and have be tested on Linux via ci. The idea that all developers spend their days running software inside Linux VMs isn't right. Many of us don't need to do that at all.

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