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Comment by actimia | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now.

Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.

Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.

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I like MacOS.

I spend most of my time in a shell, so MacOS being POSIX compliant is a huge draw for me.

What difficulty do you have browsing the web? I just click Safari and it works. Though I usually have FireFox and un-Googled Chromium running as well... and they work just fine.

I generally use shell commands to manage files, but, dragging works just fine for copying and moving them. Certainly as well as it does in Windows.

Truly, I can't imagine what you experienced that was "unusably bad".

MacOS has some quirks for sure, it's far from perfect. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the changes they've made over the years. But I am a big fan of some of them.

On the other hand, despite massive improvements to Windows security and stability over the years, I do like using Windows. (And yes I realized things like WSL exist).

> it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around

Cannot relate at all. "Move files around" is essentially the same on Windows and Mac, except on the Mac I have a UNIX shell. Browsers also behave exactly the same on every platform, and Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?

Have you ever needed to perform a reliable recursive directory copy between two drives on Windows? I have and it turned out to be a comically complicated task. Robocopy helps but als has its edge cases you need to handle. Also long path names become problematic (MAX_PATH etc).

I don’t know how Windows users deal with file copying being as bad as it is and has been there for so long.

Linux can have issues here too though, depending on the file manager being used. Some file managers there still have weirdly bad copy/move handling.

What are you even talking about? Copying folders on Winfows just works. Please explain.

By default there is a path character limit of 260 characters, although there is a method to increase it. So if you try to copy something with a long filename that is many nested folders deep, it will fail. In one office, I had a coworker who used very descriptive folder/subfolder names for everything, and he constantly had this issue.

The problem is that lots of older software allocates fixed size path buffers (mostly on the stack) that uses the MAX_PATH macro (which is set to 260). Fixing this requires recompilation.

No it doesn't. Try setting up Windows CI for a large code base, good luck. I couldn't believe this is an actual problem in 2024 either, but unfortunately it is, depending in what tools you use (Visual Studio and most Microsoft Dev tooling works great, anything cross platform is hit and miss).

Just read the limitations section of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

The comment I replied to was arguing that Mac file management sucks, no the other way around.

I daily both macOS and Linux, and have for over a decade. I think Dolphin is significantly better than Finder.

Finder is the same crap software it's always been. Windows Explorer has always been better. Nobody except the nerdiest of nerds would want to use the terminal for "moving files around".

>Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?

MacOS is a memory hog in itself. Safari is the laughingstock of browsers, so behind the times and purposely crippled by Apple.

I used to love it when it was still a capable unix with a good UI. At the same time Linux was a horrible mess, none of the desktop environments were passable.

I loved it until Tiger and Snow Leopard. After that it started going downhill. More and more features I really wanted were being deprecated (like the ability to have virtual desktops in a multi-dimensional grid). This was the first big thing that really broke my workflow and I have regretted it ever since. More and more UI things were pushed through I didn't like. The fullscreen mode became (and still is) horribly incompetent. Apps were becoming more iOS-like, dumbed down.

I put up but instead of looking forward to every exciting new OS update, I started worrying about what feature I used would next be removed or mangled beyond recognition. Eventually the negatives added up so much I left the platform entirely. I went to KDE, because that had become a powerful and configurable desktop environment through the years. I finally have my virtual desktop grid back and things are so much better for it. I found that opionated software doesn't work for me (for this reason GNOME won't ever do either). The only reason I thought it worked for me was that OSX's designers had roughly the same opinions as me. But over time this changed.

This was not a coincidence. At the same time Apple changed from a computer company to a lifestyle brand. It started appealing to the masses which started with the iPod but really kicked off in full gear with the iPhone. The Mac is really just an iPhone accessory now. Microsoft has been making attempts at becoming a lifestyle brand too, with hilarious incompetence :') Only their xbox division gets a tiny bit of the way but their main marketeers are such business suits that will never understand 'cool' even if it bites them in the ass.

Oh well.. I still use it for work because it's slightly better than Windows. And our company's Windows desktops are locked down too much.

I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?

I think he's missing the forced advertisements in the macOS startmenu. Or the forced restarts/updates :)

Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.

Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck.

There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre.

Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple monitors.

So what re: workarounds? It’s not Linux, it will never be Linux. Systems are allowed to be different and do different things.

Well that's fine, but Windows isn't Linux but everybody treats it like such, hating on it for not being Linux while people often praise macOS for being "Unix". For macOS, it doesn't have the installer system that Windows has, so solutions like Homebrew are created to try and graft Linux things on it. Usually, the trouble is that Apple has made some asinine decision with the default tooling installed or some other strange limitation.

And because Apple is constantly breaking software, it creates a lot of churn on macOS. From PowerPC to Intel to Arm, from ObjectiveC to Swift, from Cocoa to Metal, etc., they're constantly upheaving the ecosystem and OS. Meanwhile, it provides very little to the end user other than normally increasing the size of Apple's walled garden.

> Well that's fine, but Windows isn't Linux but everybody treats it like such, hating on it for not being Linux while people often praise macOS for being "Unix".

Because even being partly Unix (or technically, full Unix) is easier to deal with than Windows entirely different stack. ;P

> For macOS, it doesn't have the installer system that Windows has, so solutions like Homebrew are created to try and graft Linux things on it.

No? Homebrew was just the creation of someone who didn't like the way MacPorts did it back in the day. MacPorts is literally the FreeBSD ports tree cloned to work on macOS, and back in the day was partly funded by Apple.

(MacPorts arguably worked around the macOS-isms better than Homebrew does, but people chased Homebrew and here we are.)

> Usually, the trouble is that Apple has made some asinine decision with the default tooling installed or some other strange limitation.

Unless you can actually note one of those choices or limitations, this isn't much of a point.

> And because Apple is constantly breaking software, it creates a lot of churn on macOS. From PowerPC to Intel to Arm, from ObjectiveC to Swift, from Cocoa to Metal, etc., they're constantly upheaving the ecosystem and OS.

PowerPC to Intel to Arm happened over the space of multiple decades, and "Cocoa to Metal" doesn't even make sense in the context of tech stacks.

Your entire comment is just complaining because an alternative solution doesn't fit your built-in mental model of how things should work.

To nitpick a bit, IIRC Windows itself doesn’t support Vulkan, that’s left to GPU vendors.

Thanks for the correction. That appears to be right, but Windows allows it.

> There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre.

You literally just drag the app to the trash can. Properly sandboxed Mac apps are a delight to uninstall.

Yes, some apps are more difficult, but those are usually Windows apps that are crudely ported to MacOS and that's on the developers for not creating proper MacOS apps.

Yes. Everyone knows that. But that doesn't uninstall the application. It just deletes the top files. It doesn't remove any caching or configurations or other files in other parts of the system like a Windows uninstaller does. To do that on macOS, there are third-party apps that provide this functionality.

Windows uninstallers generally don't remove configurations and cached data, either.

Not in my experience, the majority of the time. Those that don't are usually Linux ported apps that don't utilize the install functionality properly. The point is that the OS provides the tools to do so.

Not removing settings is in fact the standard and expected behavior for MSI-based installers (i.e. those using OS-provided tools). The framework is very paranoid about tracking the origin of every artifact (files, registry keys etc), and removing something in the uninstaller that installer did not add is considered a huge no-no. It is also what users generally expect - if they uninstall and later reinstall, they want their settings to be there.

Providing the ability to remove settings is something that has to be explicitly implemented (because the installer infrastructure cannot track files created outside of the installer), so relatively few apps actually do that. Those that do pretty much always do it as an opt-in. In my 30 years of Windows use, I don't recall a single example to the contrary.

This is by design. Mac apps don't leave tons of trash around like their windows counterparts. Only some config files, always in a standard location. So when you reinstall, everything just works. Your data lives in iCloud or the documents folder, and is not meant to be deleted when you uninstall.

I don't recall that being true.

Homebrew is one of my favorite pieces of software

Installing is varied on macOS, but there's certainly a default way to uninstall applications - just drag the application to the Trash. That said I have some sympathy for your complaint, since things that have you run an installer can sprinkle themselves all over the filesystem, and though they leave a trail, there isn't a standard way to reverse that (I find AppCleaner pretty handy for removing all the parts in those cases).

> Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck.

I have non-Apple bluetooth headphones (Sennheisers) and this isn't something that happens on my M1 MacBook Pro. Is this a common issue for other people?

A quick search will verify its commonality, and like most Apple issues, it's been ongoing for years.

Huh. Weird. I've had my sennheisers for years, through multiple OS updates, and I've always been surprised by just how well using them works on my macbook pro. Until this thread, I had never even heard of the problem.

Could you elaborate? I find web browsing and moving files around to be practically an equivalent experience between mac os, windows, most linux distros.

I see sentiments very similar to this on Reddit and some other message boards. Generally the user posting them cut their teeth on Linux or Windows, and has an affinity toward the ux conventions you'd see there. Macs have different ux conventions, not bad ones, just different, and it's not what the poster is expecting.

Some call it baby dick syndrome, The user has imprinted the conventions of their first operating system on themselves, and assumes that they are universally considered "best"

Unfortunate typo.

Oof yeah

I meant to say baby DUCK syndrome, as in how baby DUCKS imprint on whatever the first thing they see as their mother. Probably too late to edit it to reflect that.

> Some call it baby dick syndrome

Ummm…

What’s wrong with the web. You just use chrome or safari and everything just works.

> Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.

I used both Windows and Mac regularly for years, and I have no idea what you're talking about.

Apple released the last major revision of the cheese grater Mac Pro in 2010. If you wanted a Mac with exotic features like a new CPU and more than one internal hard drive in 2013~ then Hackintosh was the way to do it

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