Hacker News Reader

Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

Hard disagree. Apple Silicon is by far best in class, but the OS it ships with feels like a toy to me. Can't wait for the hardware to be liberated.

View on HN

Why does MacOS feel like a toy? It's the primary OS for a huge number of developers (at least in the Bay Area) who are doing plenty of production work on it every day.

Fully support bringing a well supported Linux distro to the hardware but MacOS is nothing like ChromeOS or some sort of thin client operating system.

Not GP but I also believe that MacOS feels like a toy.

All the icons are jumping around everywhere, everything is colourful, it's 2023 and you can't maximize a window or make it take up half the screen, etc.

I also hate the touch bar but I'd probably get used to that. I used a pre-touchbar Air for a few months and going back to windows felt amazing.

I am eagerly waiting for Asahi to be usable as a daily driver, my next laptop will probably run Apple silicon.

Mouse over the green window button, hold down option and you can maximize, and tile to the left/right of the screen.

Not being able to tile more than 2 windows at once is actually pitiful for a modern OS. I really like using macOS with a tiling window manager installed, but out of the box it is unusable.

It is also possible to configure the double-click behaviour on the title bar to zoom the windows without fullscreen them...

> You can't maximize a window or make it take up half the screen

Yeah, the first thing I do when I get a new Mac is to install some tools to make the experience less annoying.

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

Rectangle: https://rectangleapp.com/

Dato: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dato/id1470584107

Caffeine: https://www.caffeine-app.net/

Paragon NTFS Driver (free for Seagate disks): https://www.seagate.com/support/software/paragon/

In my own experience, I found out GNOME 40+ to be more polished UI-wise than MacOS. I was really surprised when I installed Fedora Silverblue the first time. And also I'm a bit upset that MacOS seems to have stalled, and when Apple adds changes is to make it look more and more like iOS.

I hate the idea of requiring 6 random binaries from 6 random companies just to get the basics working like tabbing windows, resizing windows, and reading drives.

Doubly so when they are closed source and free. How are the developers making the money? Are they community supported somehow, maybe patreon? Are they tracking you? Inlining ads to your desktop? Who is paying for their apple devel tools or apple store ID?

As the saying goes, if the app is free, you are the product that company is selling

Imagine supporting 100 mac users, each with 6 random binaries installed.

* poor window management

* no built-in package manager

* low hackability/customizability

* constant code signing prompts with 3rd party software, my OS is fighting me trying to use software

* constant prompts to please finally sign into icloud

* deprecated OpenGL

* general handholding in the OS getting in the way

> It's the primary OS for a huge number of developers (at least in the Bay Area) who are doing plenty of production work on it every day.

How much of that work is being done in Electron?

Can't wait indeed, they will be excellent BSD machines when all is said and done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com