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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

s/Linux/Unix

MacOS is better though.

This is a joke, right? MacOS is all over the place?

Agreed...I fail to see how macOS is an improvement. I mean, you have /Applications, but you also have /Library, ~/Library, and so on.

And /Applications, and /System/Applications, even though if you open them in Finder, you'll see the two combined.

And ~/Applications, and /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin, and homebrew, and Mac ports, tell me again how Mac is better?

I just wasn’t aware of these issues. Let me rephrase it then: MacOS’ intentions were better. :)

Eh............................. maybe? :)

I'd say that MacOS is even worse which is impressive given that Apple has the absolute control of the platform and seemingly infinite resources and could have refactored the mess at any point.

I would guess the RoI of refactoring (especially on a consumer OS) is pretty low though.

The average person never sees this stuff. Linux is widely used as a server OS and it still has taken a long time for new appraoches to get traction.

> I'd say that MacOS is even worse which is impressive given that Apple has the absolute control of the platform and seemingly infinite resources and could have refactored the mess at any point.

That's true, but also irrelevant. The file system can be a mess on MacOS because most MacOS users will never actually interact with the file system in any meaningful way. Apple obscures the file system away from its users by design. If you ask the average Mac user where on the computer their files are stored, they'll likely tell you something like, "They're all in the Photos app". On the other hand, even a fairly novice linux/unix user will almost certainly end up interacting with filesystem directly at some point, probably a lot.

I think the basic file system exposed to users in the Finder is pretty simple. /Applications, app bundles, etc.

The Unix under the hood is just standard stuff and Apples hides away detritus like .plist files. And sandboxed apps have their own little stub filesystems too.

Anyway I like the idea of GoboLinux a lot but kind of think GUIX, just abstracting it away might be the right approach.

FreeBSD doesn’t have as big mess of a file system as many Linux distributions do, in my opinion.

It is 100% as complicated and guided by historical principles that are, 50 years later, almost totally arbitrary.

I use both. I see no improvement whatsoever in the BSD approach.

It’s a mess, but at least they have the decency to install 3rd party software under /usr/local

I like that userland is kept separate from base as much as possible, but agree it could be even better. I do think the BSDs have more coherency than Linux on the whole. Would be nice if we could simplify things down even further, but I suspect it just becomes one giant bikeshedding exercise, which is probably why it's easier to just cling on to hier https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hier

All the major BSDs have relatively clean file systems, at least compared to practically everything else out there.

macOS has pros and cons.

The external monitor fiasco is a dealbreaker for me.

External monitor fiasco? Limitations on monitor count by CPU?

non pro versions of the M chip only support one external monitor... which is just silly

Yeah it's pretty silly. I guess Apple looked at their market and figured something out that met the majority of use cases, but not having that freedom is very frustrating.

I think it's instructive to consider the history of the M1 Macs here.

In many ways they are essentially a sort of iPad with a keyboard and a USB port or 2 instead of an iPad or Apple Lightning connector.

The GPU is very closely coupled to the CPU inside the SoC, as is the RAM and the soldered-in flash nonvolatile storage.

You can't just boot them off USB. You can't just plug in extra drives. You can't add more memory or bigger SSDs without extremely elaborate desoldering of BGA parts.

These are not "PCs with an Arm ISA chip". They're a whole computer, disks and all, in a single closed package, without all the buses and connectors of COTS x86 kit -- which is _why_ they are so much faster.

You can choose to complain that it so doesn't support it natively, or you can just buy the aftermarket hardware that does support it and get on with your dual-head, non-pro life. Or upgrade your monitor to a single curved 5k ultra wide monitor, which is better than dual-head, imo.

What are these hardware hacks you suggest?

Add a USB display, broadly.

https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-o...

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/463371/how-to-supp...

DisplayLink is a standard for connecting GPUs over USB. It's slow but it kinda sorta works -- I have an ancient DisplayLink 7" USB display. Works great on Windows, and I could have a tiny second screen with a console prompt on it, or Task Manager or something, when working on the move on a laptop.

over USB-3 it's a lot better than "slow but it kinda sorta works", like drive a 4k display reasonably well kind of good.

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