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Comment by gtvwill | Hacker News Reader

Linux on desktop has been ready for years now, it absolutely shreds apple and microsofts offerings, ubuntu desktop is about as schmick as it gets regardless of your views of the parent company.

Mac on the other hand is an absolute nightmare to administer for clients. Same with their phones. Printing from web browser on a Mac? Completely broken. Have to save everything to desktop and open it from there. It's an absolute joke. Wanna use your 7 year old Mac to browse the web? Oh wait you can't because the os blocks it. Legit joke of a product.

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It’s an extraordinary claim that Mac printing is broken. It’s one area where it’s vastly superior to any other OS I’ve frequently used (including Windows, all of the common BSDs, and more Linux distros than you’ve heard of).

With pretty much any printer brand sold at Office Max, Mac printing looks like:

1. Hit cmd-P.

2. Find the printer in the pop up window and click the Print button.

3. Walk over and get the paper.

The same’s true for AirPrint from iPhones and iPads. I don’t remember the last time I had trouble printing from any of those to any Brother or Canon or HP around any of the offices I’ve helped. That doesn’t count the time the previous admin had blocked mDNS on the router because he had a cargo cult theory of network security.

Can I ctrl-paste the contents of my phone's clipboard onto my Linux computer? How many hours would that take to set up? Because that works out of the box with Macs and iPhones. Pretty useful daily.

Kde connect works fine most of the time to share clipboard, send files, etc

I had a look into KDE connect out of interest, but found it to be quite lacking in functionality for iOS. The limitations likely stem from Apple's locked down approach to their OS and security, but the limitations remain.

https://userbase.kde.org/KDEConnect#Missing_or_limited_featu...

It's quite easy with kdeconnect.

Except it requires VPN when not on the same LAN for some reason...

How should it work? Send everything through a central server? Try to hole-punch through NAT? Ubiquitous IPv6 might help, but we're not there yet.

A self-hostend STUN/TURN server maybe? I don't know but I'm def not installing a VPN for this. Considering I might have another one already running. The issues that would arise from this are numerous.

Yeah that's been easy for a few years now. Kdeconnect works great/it's been available on Linux since well before windows got it.

I don't trust the definition of "easy" from a Linux man. For me easy means logging into my iCloud account and having it work by default.

It's even easier than that; you don't even have to setup an account.

When your devices are on the same network, you can just request pairing on one device and accept pairing on the other. Done.

> Printing from web browser on a Mac? Completely broken.

Doing this more than a decade? Didn't see any brokenness to be honest.

> Wanna use your 7 year old Mac to browse the web? Oh wait you can't because the os blocks it.

Nope. My 2014 MBP is a happy camper and use it daily at home. No blocks whatsoever.

> Linux on desktop has been ready for years now, it absolutely shreds apple and microsofts offerings

That's true though. Laptop power management is not there yet, but I prefer Linux over anything else for the last ~15 years or so. I use Mac laptops because I like the hardware and see where another UNIX based OS is.

> Mac on the other hand is an absolute nightmare to administer for clients. Same with their phones.

I think Apple phones are relatively easy to mass-manage via Apple Configurator, but MDM is a totally different story in macOS. Glad that my machines are not managed.

Man printing is broken on macs I've had a handful of callouts for exactly that lately on a ramge of different macs.

Same with print from iphones. Broken, and when it breaks you get zero ways to chase whats going wrong. Meanwhile every other device on site have zero problems.

I literally spend a large portion of my days dealing with these problems for a variety of clients on a variety of sites. It's at a point with Apple where I just flat out refuse the work unless their a really special client. Atleast if I have a problem on a Microsoft device for business I can call support and get a phone back from a tech usually within 24 hours. Can't get that from apple.

Last absolute head scratcher was syncing multiple Gmail accounts with a variety of passwords and passkeys to a single iCalendar. Turns out passkeys overwrite more than one Gmails settings in ios back to just its email and nerf all the others. Hot tip for anyone doing this don't ever use passkeys for that setup if doing multiple accounts. Not sure if it was Googles end on how their passkey is set out or apples end on how it interprets it but it was a 2.5 hour nightmare.

I usually use my Macs with a fleet of printers from Xerox, Samsung and HP. Only the (archaic) Xerox needed a .ppd file from Xerox. The others are running with default drivers supplied with the system, and all work as first-class citizens, with all their features enabled (incl. the Xerox).

Same is true for iPhone/AirPrint. As long as the mDNS packets are unhindered in the network, and the printer has semi-decent AirPrint support, they work automagically. Again, Samsung and HP printers are networked and AirPrint enabled.

All any any devices (Linux / Windows / macOS / iOS / Android) on their respective networks can and do print without any drivers to these printers. They start printing instantly, with all features enabled, and honoring all options selected in the print dialog.

I have two Google accounts on my iPhone and Mac, but only one of them uses passkeys IIRC, and absolutely have no problems for now. Will look out for the scenario though, thanks.

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