Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew is famous for making life hard for users. It makes "design decisions" that often conflict with users' needs, all in order to live up to the personal preferences of the project leads.

Personally I use asdf to manage my software on Macs. It too has also changed its design recently to become user-hostile (the command-line tool no longer prints the options for the commands, and it's full of bugs since a recent major version change).

For anyone looking to make an alternative to Homebrew: check out asdf's plugin system! It is insanely easy for anyone to make an asdf plugin, install it, use it. It's just a directory of plaintext files/scripts somewhere on the web. I made a couple plugins for unpackaged apps within like 30 minutes of learning how plugins worked. Very "unix philosophy" (in a good way)

(aside: I'm not a "Mac person" (forced to use one by work), so I know this is an unpopular opinion, but Macs feel worse to use than either Windows or Linux. At least Windows has WSL2 if you like command-lines (or PowerShell if you're into that). OTOH Macs ship with insanely outdated incompatible tools, and the 3rd-party options are annoying as hell. Why do technical people keep using Macs?)

Apple loves to change which tools they ship, too, it at least have for the last few years as system updates were routinely breaking our build scripts at work, mostly when Apple would replace a GNU tool with a BSD tool without warning i think.

I agree though, Finder is a joke, the macOS system preferences has gotten incredibly cluttered and hard to use, the ever stricter code signing and download-opening restrictions are frustrating, and i can't even just install and run the docker CLI--docker on Mac requires Desktop and commercial use of Desktop requires a license.

All 3 systems have things about them that annoy me, but I'm with you that Mac is my least favorite. And it kinda sucks because the global text shortcuts (command-arrow, command-delete etc) are really handy and hard to replicate on other systems, and at least traditionally it's been a very pretty and well integrated desktop, the system itself just drives me up a wall.

> Apple loves to change which tools they ship, too, it at least have for the last few years as system updates were routinely breaking our build scripts at work, mostly when Apple would replace a GNU tool with a BSD tool without warning i think.

It's a licensing issue; Apple has never shipped GPLv3 software. This has been discussed dozens of times on HN.

Of course you can use Homebrew to install a GNU toolchain to your heart's content.

Well there's now an MIT-licensed Rust rewrite of GNU coretools. Maybe in a few years they'll ship that, and we won't have to faff about with crappy 3rd party solutions. (I mean, seriously, when Windows ships with better dev tools than you? That's embarrassing.)

Just FYI: macOS has been a BSD-derived operating system from the beginning, using stuff from FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD on a Mach kernel. It’s a certified UNIX™ operating system.

And because GPLv3 is incompatible with how Apple operates, they ship versions of pre-GPLv3 software like Bash 3.2.

Apple now ships openrsync [1] as a replacement for rsync due to licensing issues.

[1]: https://appleinsider.com/inside/macos-sequoia/tips/what-you-...

I'd have sworn they used to ship nano instead of pico; but i could be misremembering, regardless, the behavior of the tools changed and the only solution was install the gnu version from brew (and later, move the whole build to docker when Apple broke something else that used to work fine on both Mac and Linux)

> i can't even just install and run the docker CLI--docker on Mac requires Desktop and commercial use of Desktop requires a license.

That's not on Apple. Docker needs the Linux kernel (for Linux containers), so it's no different to needing something like Docker Desktop to use Docker on Windows. Yeah, Docker changed the license on Docker Desktop, but there's plenty of alternatives (Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima, Apple's own container tool, or just running a Linux VM in Lima).

(I may be wrong here but) under the hood Docker on macOS runs a small Linux VM where all containers live, exactly because containers are basically Linux namespaces on steroids so not portable 1:1 to anywhere.

I'm not blaming Apple for it, but it makes me dislike their platform more regardless

Windows makes the irritations of mac seem as tiny in comparison. Especially with them starting to move more and more to push AI into monitoring and screen capturing and keylogging literally everything you do or will ever do in the operating system. A great big No Thanks to that.

Try mise

https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

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