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kevin_thibedeau

If only they could spare a few dozen devs to update the command line tools to the 21st century.

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Please explain how this will increase the stock price in the next week, otherwise it will not be prioritized

to Tim Cook, yes, but not to Steve Jobs.

I don't think Steve Jobs would care any more about command-line MacOS tools than Tim does

Steve Jobs would lean into making Apple the #1 AI developer platform and showcase at WWDC how the terminal is now obsolete

He wasn’t stupid. He’d observe their own developers and see how they rely on the terminal and command line for their work. He’d ask pointed questions and demand thoughtful answers.

Then he’d find a way to make it the #1 AI developer platform or distort reality until it is.

My comment wasn't sarcastic. My comment is aligned with the last paragraph you wrote.

Yeah, the real stock market mover is the mouse cursor. That wiggly thing they did that grows the mouse cursor really send ripples throughout Wall Street.

Given its value for aging users with weakening eyes, that tracks :)

Or you can take the extra minute to install them yourself with brew, this a complete non issue for anyone that understands the command line in the 21st century using MacOS. Also, I would never build anything against macos userland because it's almost never the target.

these two are orthogonal to each other.

Brew takes a minute just to update itself, let alone install anything.

And then everything needs to have the /opt/brewsomethingsomething PATH. /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin not good enough.

MacPorts is The Way.

In the big '25? Nixpkgs is the New Way.

So what? Do you complain when apt, yum, dnf, pacman, ports, or any other package management system does a download? I bet you don't, so it's not really a usable argument. Secondly, yeah, not tainting my systems OS and system paths is a good thing and opt/ from the filesystem perspective is the absolute right place to put add on packages.

  "The /opt/ directory is normally reserved for software and add-on packages that are not part of the default installation"

I complain every single time apt, yum have to self update for a solid half minute plus.

Desktop Linux is right here, desktops Linux has always been here!

I don't understand why people complain about Apple neglecting developers when desktop Linux provides a superior experience aside from the rare times you need to compile an iOS/Mac specific application.

I don't get it either, it takes twenty minutes to burn a USB stick and run the installer. It takes me longer to remove the bloatware and set up my preferred settings on a proprietary OS than it does to install Linux nowadays, and that's been true for a decade at least now.

It's just not hard! It's not more work! And yet the meme about it being more trouble just. won't. die.

You people are supposed to be technologists! Why won't you spend 20 minutes of one time setup to get a better experience?

Not all hardware works? I don't see anybody complaining about having a limited set of hardware options when they buy Apple! Canonical maintains a list of fully compatible computers; just pick one, buy it, and you wind up with a computer just as easy to use as Mac OS but without the endless paper cuts of using a system that has no respect for you at all and thinks it knows better

I use Apple laptops primarily for the hardware. But Linux has never really been a great experience on Mac laptops when it comes to battery life, reliable suspend/resume, etc. etc. I used to use Yellow Dog Linux on a G4 PowerBook way back in the day, but I haven’t had much luck with Linux on Mac hardware since then.

Most of us have .dotfiles, I can snap any macos installation into my preferred configuration in about 5-10 minutes unattended depending on internet speeds. I do most of my work in a terminal, as long as that works, I'm good on Linux, MacOS, and BSD's. They all have pros and cons.

I only wish Apple’s terminal supported Tektronix and ReGIS. And provided a sane implementation for sixels.

> desktop Linux provides a superior experience aside from the rare times you need to compile an iOS/Mac specific application

or reliably use peripherals

Wow, did you travel here from 2002?

Edit: In case it's not clear from my initial, gut-driven snark: I definitely think if you use a reasonably popular distro (commercially backed or not) in 2025, you should never have any trouble connecting peripherals to it, with the possible exception of Bluetooth, which I hear also applies to macOS.

Nope, I came directly from an MS Teams meeting where the desktop linux users had no audio.

I'm on Windows, and my work laptop has no audio via its headphone jack.

I have no idea how this is supposed to even work, and since it's not my computer I don't mess around trying to install drivers. I just use my phone to call in for Teams.

Things happen, let's not act like any OS is perfect.

MacOS is definitely not perfect. I'm being snarky. But it has been my anecdotal experience as both a user and observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and stable for desktop use than Linux. This is unsurprising since it's easier to build a stable walled garden than an open ecosystem.

Macs are generally more reliable, but if you buy a year old ThinkPad Linux will be just as stable .

The only issue Linux really has is when new chipsets come out you might need to wait 6 months or so for the drivers to be updated. But to be completely fair, on one of my laptops I had no webcam support for like six or seven months until Windows update decided to finally install it for me.

If you need a significant amount of hard drive space, Macs are almost always exorbitantly expensive. I make music so I find myself dual booting between windows and Linux. I don't want to speed 3k+ on a MacBook just to get a 4TB SSD I can add to any Windows PC for 200$.

Plus on Linux you can customize your personal experience to a much greater level. If you dislike X,Y,Z you can disable it or find an alternative.

Both OSX and Windows are cramming so much monetization into the OS, there's a very real feeling that I'm just sharing my computer with a giant corporation rather than actually owning it.

It’s less convenient when you are on the go, but you can pack an external SSD and offload stuff to it. A friend of mine had one velcroed to the back of the screen.

It's actually cheaper to own a MacBook Air for things that need to work 100%, like a coding interview, and then a secondary laptop when you're playing video games or making music .

That's basically what I do now, my old M1 MacBook air is more than good enough for LeetCode and I'm more or less know it's never going to fail.

> But it has been my anecdotal experience as both a user and observing colleagues that MacOS is more reliable and stable for desktop

You mean a few month after a new MacOS version has shipped and they've got time to fix all the bugs it introduced, right?

I haven't personally experienced that problem. Updates on Mac have always been smooth for me. But I'm a sample of one and it's probably workflow dependent.

MS Teams audio issues aren't the best example -- ask anyone forced to use Windows

Presumably these users have audio in other contexts? Are they running the web app version of teams? Do other web apps play audio? From 10000 feet up, I wouldn’t start by blaming Linux here (even as a non-Linux-desktop user,)

This isn't a hill I want to die on, but isn't it the case that even if the problem is in MS software compatibility with Linux that still results in desktop Linux being a less reliable platform for day to day use?

Depends on the day to day use. I have experienced a lot more pain on Windows than on any other platform. Perhaps HP-UX or AIX 3.x were more painful.

The inability of the people you work with to use their devices means almost nothing. It’s as if you said nothing.

I came from meet where none of the macs could screen share due to recent OS updates :)

to be fair Teams barely works on Windows

Team barely works, period. It’s almost a feature, actually.

Last year I was using a Windows laptop for work and Teams was very unreliable with audio and video. And don’t even think of using the nice camera on top of the expensive video conferencing monitor on my desk.

I went through 5 distros a month ago dealing with fractional scaling issues on my 4K monitors. Decided it is not worth dealing with a went back to macOS so… No.

I feel like I spent a significant chunk of the mid 1990s editing /etc/X11/XF86Config in search of the right incantation...

> with the possible exception of Bluetooth

Good thing no one uses that!

Tons of peripheral devices do not work well or reliably on Linux, and I literally cannot remember the last time I have had ANY issue with Bluetooth on macOS. Certainly not in the last decade.

I don’t remember the last time I had an issue with Bluetooth on Linux either. Most likely before 2010 or so.

The last time I did was this morning. I get dropped connections constantly, microphone not working in Teams (solved by reboot), pegged connections preventing handoff, etc.

Desktop Linux is an oxymoron. i’ve tried it many times and every single time I went back to macOS.

Any particular reasons?

I had an old i5 Mac mini laying about I wanted to use desktop Linux on the other day. The last time I tried, was about 20 years ago. I note nothing has changed since.

I have one of those running the latest Fedora. It’s a great workstation.

I use macOS because it's the only OS to reliably support Apple's Macbook M series.

(Unless someone wants to correct me.)

If you are paying for Apple hardware, it’s silly to use an OS that’ll make it only less reliable and compatible.

I very recently tried again to adopt Linux on the desktop. I'm really sick of feeling like a frog in a pot of water. It's becoming harder and harder to bypass their literal gatekeeping of which applications I can run on my computer, and with every new version of macOS the temperature in the pot keeps rising.

The main problem I have with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.

The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. So I installed a Gnome shell extension[1] that exports information about the active window state to a DBUS endpoint. That let me write a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.

After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am on my Mac. My main applications are Emacs, Firefox, Mattermost, Slack, ChatGPT, Discord, Kitty, and Steam. My Linux box was previously my Windows gaming box (don't get me started about frog boiling on Windows) and I'm amazed that I can play all my favorite titles (Manor Lords, Hell Let Loose, Foundation) on Linux with Proton.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[1]: https://github.com/hseliger/window-calls-extended

I made this. It makes it easy to use all of the most common gnu tools via brew, without having to do gsed for sed, etc... all with working man pages. It also lets you switch back easily in a shell session if you need the mac native ones for some godforsaken reason:

https://github.com/kilna/gnu-on

Apparently there is a 20,000 surplus somewhere waiting to jump in.

I heard they have strong Nordic developers waiting for free markets in Greenland.

I bet the Panamanian Ai industry masses are also sitting on the edge for this.

You mean how the Unix standard tools on Mac are way behind Linux?

So are the BSD tools by some definition of "behind". Another way to look at this is to say that GNU tools as typically seen in modern Linux are bloated (I know, Linux and "bloat" are kind of a meme, but it is generically true for the most part when it comes to the command line utilities feature creep over the years, so it's a useful and descriptive word).

I have to work with old machines and legacy operating systems quite a bit in my day to day and I always am going to prefer something lighter and with less ways to shoot myself in the foot w.r.t. POSIX compliance. MacOS is Unix certified so I appreciate them being somewhat reserved in the features they add on top of POSIX.

Modern GNU userland utils are nice and fun but if you are looking for compatibility it's best not to use them. Consequently, the MacOS situation doesn't bother me especially given you can install more up to date tools if you want. I think keeping the defaults older and more compatible is a good thing.

What tools do you prefer?

I prefer a lot of the BSD variants of the typical POSIX tools (i.e. bsdtar vs GNU tar, ksh or similar instead of bash, etc etc). Usually because they add less extensions on top of what is required by POSIX, but are still easily acquired in a modern Linux distribution. I mostly just alias them.

If I write a script using BSD esque tools I can be reasonably sure they will work on any Unix-like, whereas if I write/test my script on a machine using GNU utils, I'm fairly likely to accidentally use a GNU extension that would cause the script to fail on an older Unix-like OS. For instance, I do a lot of work migrating code off of AIX,and I need the scripts I develop to work on AIX when I'm gathering environment information from customers. I can't just assume they will have a ~2020+ implementation of Unix userland tools with all the GNU extensions and nice features. Sometimes the machines have been sitting quietly in the back of a data center not being updated for quite a while and will have more "90s style" of Unix tools.

There is poor cross-UNIX compatibility if you're doing anything complicated, anyway. I maintained a large test suite for about a year that was written in POSIX sh and targeted Linux, macos, {Free,Open,Net}BSD. It wasn't fun because every program behaved in slightly different ways, half of them undocumented (for example, I remember having lots of pain with how different versions of tail handled SIGPIPE).

In the end it was was easier to rewrite in Perl than to keep maintaining that thing, struggling for hours to find ways of implementing every little bit of functionality that worked reliably on every OS. You'd add or fix something, and the tests would break on FreeBSD. You would fix it there and it would stop working on NetBSD. And so it goes.

This is true about cross Unix compatibility. I can still dream though.

For a simple version bump, I feel like brew is fine. Or do you have other tooling updates in mind?

Many people here are commenting that brew is a good way to get modern tools. I must say, I prefer Docker by several country miles.

It’s like having the tools in a different computer. You can mount your local filesystem onto the container, but if feels like WSL - there’s always an “impedance mismatch” between the two sides.

I prefer to use the tools running locally on the same OS I’m working with. For that, MacPorts is great.

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