Hacker News Reader

Comment by ionwake | Hacker News Reader

It is. I remember spending substantial time getting to know centos and ricing it because it was the technical superior way to do it.

Realised KDE was terrible and none of it was worth the hassle.

I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

View on HN

> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.

Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.

I really feel this, and it is so disappointing. Since 2012 my primary development machine has been a MacBook Pro, and my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro is maybe my favorite workstation ever (they brought back the good keyboard, the M1 processor is so fast, and the battery life is insane—even at three years old I will get through half a day of work and zoom calls and only be down to 80%).

But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.

Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.

Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.

> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

Can confirm: I have never sysadminned for myself recreationally. After I bungled an Arch upgrade (by failing to read the notes) I bought a Mac and haven't looked back. Yeah, it ships with a weird awk, and the GNU tools it comes with are pretty dated, but it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.

IMO, most of people who always flex bout their skill on using arch or kali linux doesn't really use it and don't have basic knowledge about unix/linux. As a DevOps and sometimes be sysadmin, I've interviewed a lot of self-proclaimed "hacker" (most of them are young) and most of them lack of fundamental knowledge about process, memory and networking, when they are the most important thing to do anything seriously in linux/unix.

> it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.

People has been making argument for years about the best distro and which distro makes them look like a god. Now, anything which helps me do my job as fast as I can is the best and I think Debian/Ubuntu is the best distro to work with. Large user base, familiar interface and pretty up-to-date software is the selling point of Debian/Ubuntu.

As a Mac user, this also bugged me. One thing that helped was to...

    brew install coreutils

... and then adding gnubin to my path so I can use them without the "g" prefix:

    PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"

Now I no longer have to remember idiosyncrasies of the macOS versions, such as:

    # macOS
    cp -R

    # Linux
    cp -r

Reply on news.ycombinator.com