Hacker News Reader

Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. People were talking about real Unix terminals, for example.

Later Windows also aimed for the same thing with their new console app and Linux support. Yet macOS has remained the same. The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged and there’s no good app package service (eg brew etc - these are third party and can mess up your system.)

Even Xcode is, well… look how extensions were restricted.

Modern macOS feels boring, but also not aimed at developers.

View on HN

Back in early 2000s it was a top choice if you wanted some kind of unixy box with a polished GUI desktop that "just worked", especially if you wanted a laptop. BSD and Linux were fine, but as a desktop OS they were a very different experience from today, took way more tinkering even on a desktop PC as anyone who had to write their own X11 config will tell you. Today installing a Linux desktop distro is so easy and hardware compatibility is so good that the tables have turned, also if you are the type of user that wants a big DE (no judgement) the Linux DEs today are far more polished, people still complain today but if you go back in time it was a mess. These days MacOS seems extremely restrictive and awkward by comparison, on the one hand a huge chunk of the userland got stuck in time, while Apple have become more and more hostile to any kind of changes and customisations to the more unixy side of the system.

Sun had an agreement with Toshiba for Solaris laptops, but they were rather pricey.

UNIX is stuck in time, hardly anything improved beyond file systems, and small API improvements, and that is what macOS is measured against, POSIX certification.

To note that the only standard UNIX UI is CDE, and anything 3D isn't part of POSIX.

ZFS, BcacheFS, HammerFS... I think OpenBSD will have a better FS soon.

On modern FS', the plan9/9front ones are pretty much ahead of almost anything; but plan9 it's a Unix 2.0. It went further. On 3D, forget POSIX. GL was the de facto API and now Vulkan, and the most common middleware multimedia API it's SDL2.

Yeah, but none of that is UNIX(tm).

While IrisGL was born on Irix, it was placed under ARB stewardship, which after Long Peaks disaster became Khronos.

Vulkan only exists thanks to AMD offering Mantle to Khronos, an API designed originally for game consoles, very much not UNIX, and had it not been for AMD, Khronos would still be thinking what OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like.

SDL also has very little with UNIX history, as it was created originally to port games from Windows to Mac OS (not OS X) and BeOS.

Linux isn’t too bad on desktops these days (at least if you’ve got well-suited hardware), but laptops are still hit or miss. Even laptops with well-supported hardware running something like powertop often have middling battery life, which isn’t helped by how on many distros things like h.264 hardware acceleration is not enabled in browsers out of the box.

System76 is great and all but we really, really need a vertically integrated “Apple” of Linux laptops that goes the extra mile to dial in everything to perfection.

I don’t think much has changed, MacOS is still a good desktop Unix for development that is simple and just works, and Linux still lacks good hardware support, especially on laptops. Although in truth most of my MacOS development is actually in Linux containers.

I use macos and Pop_Os as my two main systems and both work really well. I got over the bleeding edge linuxism years ago as my 20s passed into obscurity. Both are respectable systems, and my need to tweak and adjust my setup has gone by the wayside. These days I just want something that works and both work fine for the jobs I need of them and can run a couple of weeks or more with no crashes or need to reboot until the next security updates come out. Linux does have limited hardware support, but it's easy to remedy if you do a little research, macOS is naturally limited in hardware selection; both are easily worked around.

> The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?! It's a rock-solid workhorse. If they changed it I would stop trusting macOS to be any better than the linux flavor of the month

Good point, but:

* I'd prefer better font rendering

* I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait.

* Semi-transparent background was cool in the 2000s; these days everything is blurred like it's Vista (not a criticism, Windows does it too, it's just UI fashion.) A terminal background is a place where that might be genuinely useful.

* This may be the shell, but when I reboot and restart I get my Terminal tabs reopened to the same working directories, but the history is identical between all of them. I run different commands in different folders for different reasons, and I want to be able to press up-arrow to get back the last command(s) per tab.

I am far from a Terminal, shell, or anything related expert. There may be solutions to the above. But third party terminal apps exist so there must be a market for some problems & solutions.

The Terminal seems like one of those things that management declares to be “done” and then nobody touches it for a decade, until somebody notices that there’s enough user outcry for a big overhaul. That’s what happened on Windows, where the console rotted for decades until there was finally enough attention to justify the (actually very nice!) new Windows Terminal. Hopefully there will be, because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.

I’ve tried iTerm several times and have never been able to understand the appeal. The most interesting feature to me is the Visor-style dropdown terminal but that feature doesn’t work half as well as the Visor haxie for Terminal.app did, somehow.

> because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.

iTerm always struck me as slow and bloated. I think it's just a matter of taste.

> I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier

I believe basic gnu readline semantics are followed here, and most text editing fields elsewhere, with emacs keybindings - ctl-a for start of line, ctl-e for end, esc f for forward word, etc. “esc e” to open $EDITOR with the command line in a tmp file.

> * I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait.

Ctrl-A moves you to the beginning of the line (and Ctrl-E to the end of the line); Option-left-arrow moves you left by word, option-right-arrow right by word.

> I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!).

You can. Just hold down the option key and click wherever you want in the command.

What’s wrong with Terminal.app’s font rendering? Looks as good as any other mac app to my eyes, at least on HiDPI displays.

>I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse

In Terminal.app you may alt-click to make the cursor jump to where you’ve clicked. Besides, I use alt-arrows to jump between words: I don’t remember whether that’s out of the box, though. In any case, you may configure the relevant codes in the Keyboard section of the preferences.

iterm2 is so much better it's not even funny, but terminal is fine and don't recall it ever crashing on me, unlike wezterm, which I tried for a while, but without fail would lock up the terminal every couple of days to the point I'd have to kill the session. Luckily whatever I'm doing is usually running in tmux anyway.

I've never had brew mess up my system and I've been using it and MacOS for over a decade... How can it mess up your system? I think one time brew itself got wedged on updates and I didn't care to bother to figure out what it was, followed the instructions on how to properly blow it away, and reinstalled with barely a hitch.

Brew winds up hogging an inappropriate amount of disk space on every system I’ve ever installed it on. I switched to nix recently and haven’t had that problem yet.

That being said I haven’t investigated and it could be user error. But brew can absolutely bork your shit

Having it cache a bunch of crap to your disc isn't exactly "borking your shit". Just delete it. There's probably some settings flag you can export in your shell .rc to control that behavior, but its so not a problem it hasn't been worth my time to go look up how to do it.

> I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity.

* https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25

> there’s no good app package service

It's called the App Store.

I don’t think you can call the Mac App Store “good”.

Sure, it's horrible. It only makes it easier than any other platform for developers to make money by selling their software to users. And it only makes it easy and secure for users to purchase and install software. Awful.

When's the last time you used the App Store to install a CLI utility or a shared library?

Usually Xcode.

    xcode-select --install

That doesn’t install Xcode.

Not exactly...

The App Store install what you would install through .dmg or .pkg. This is, if you install, for example, Android Studio, Docker and UTM, you will have three QEMU executables, one for each app.

Homebrew does quite a good job as a package manager for Mac, however, it's far from how the package managers work in Linux distros. For example, by running ``sudo pacman -Syu`` I upgrade everything that is installed, including the kernel, standard libraries, Python packages, language packages, manpages and so on. In Mac, I have to upgrade the system through system updates, homebrew packages through ``brew upgrade``, Python packages through pip, the App Store installed stuff through App Store and the manually installed apps through whatever the way they are upgraded.

> For example, by running ``sudo pacman -Syu`` I upgrade everything that is installed, including the kernel, standard libraries, Python packages, language packages, manpages and so on.

I actually view this as a liability. System package management should be distinct from userspace package management.

Agreed. Joining system and user packages leads to cases like "how did my python upgrade break yum".

It won't happen if the packages are well maintained. Note that if you want a different version for your project you should use a pyenv or similar and have finer control on its dependencies

A pyenv is separating system and user / project packages. You could take it one step further and use pkgsrc, Nix, or homebrew. That way you can get a newer redis/RabbitMQ/whatever not just newer python.

You can still use pip inside pyenv or similar. Pacman would install the system-wide stuff, so you won't need to bother about the libraries that a package that you have installed is using.

Mentioning this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/. This only made sense after using a Mac. While using Manjaro it was quite organized: only the pacman-installed libraries and the ones of my user projects. Now in Mac I have the default Python, the several Python versions installed from several dependencies in Homebrew, and so on.

> You can still use pip inside pyenv or similar.

That seems to be the worst of all possible worlds.

Perhaps not the best, which could be maybe something like Nix. But this is the opposite of what we have that in Mac

I think my point was:

> Pacman would install the system-wide stuff

Most system-wide stuff is userspace. I was more referring to a divide between the OS-core (kernel, drivers, init scripts) and userspace. Upgrading userspace should not incidentally not allow the system to boot.

You can use topgrade (https://github.com/topgrade-rs/topgrade) to update system, homebrew, npm, python, cargo with only one command. It also works on Linux and Windows.

Do developers use the app store? 99% of what I install on my computer isn't available through the app store. I just use it for Apple apps (Pages etc). Pretty much everything else is freely available and more fully featured outside the app store.

Plus, it's spammed with low-quality for-profit crapware—the iOSification of an otherwise fantastic platform

Yes, they publish their apps on the App Store and make money from customers.

As for Apple making life easier for developers by making their OS more like Linux, that is not good for the rest of their users, and these users are more important than developers. It's preferable that developers jump through some hoops, rather than making the OS worse for non-developers.

There's the third option of "not enshittifying the os but also not making it more like linux"

Which forces sandboxing and App Store regulations on everything on it.

There’s a really good reason the Mac App Store isn’t that big.

Apple decided they only care about porn editors. Basically. lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com