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Comment by psychoslave | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I started using a Mac only 3 years ago when joining my current job. The UX always felt so wrong on every matter to me. I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

With a lot of tools from third parties, it puts back the level to supportable, but that's the highest satisfaction level it ever procured to me. Rectangle and some alternative window switcher plus brew are the minimum to survive without going crazy after 2 minutes of exposition. Having finder always present in window switcher and no way to close/hide it? What a monstrosity!

I'm still looking for a working solution to select and paste with middle click.

Glad I don't have to use it out of work.

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> I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

Yeah it's a head scratcher for me too.

So many devs only want to work on a Mac yet they build software that runs on NOT Mac. Then they have to jump through hoops like architecture mismatch and docker having to run a Linux vm anyway.

Tahoe will be gone in 7 months when macOS 27 comes out. Meanwhile we've been talking about ads in the Windows 11 start bar since 2021 and Gnome 3's Gnaval gazing since who knows when?

Apple tries something weird every now and then and then a year later we get something different. Yes, Tahoe was a giant miss, but I'd wager macOS is not what really attracts devs to Apple anyway - it's the hardware that makes Macs such an appealing dev machine. Large glass trackpads with incredible touch controls, aluminum bodies, long lasting batteries, cool and quiet, great screens, years of support - the list goes on.

Snapdragon is only just now finally taking off in the Windows/Linux space, so the landscape could finally change here soon, but for now anyone who's gone ARM is not looking to ever go back to x64 hardware - at least for development (gaming is another convo).

> it's the hardware that makes Macs such an appealing dev machine. Large glass trackpads with incredible touch controls, aluminum bodies, long lasting batteries, cool and quiet

Probably so, but I've seen more than a few Macbook Pro keyboards dome up due to heat so bad that you couldn't close the lid.

I am at that age were I do not want anything new. Windows is still basically what it was when I was young- with the caveat that you have to spend a few hours tweaking it. Which is not a huge deal for something you do once every 5 years.

I prefer Linux as well just to get the same tools and architecture like you said. But at work everything corporate is configured for mac by default. So running Linux is a battle to having to keep up with VPN and other stuff they have.

All that Corporate IT stuff can work on Linux, we just have to start demanding Linux for them to put in the effort. Macs used to be in the same position, Corporate IT only knew how to manage Windows so that's what everyone got. Eventually the ability to use a Mac became enough of a recruitment draw that they had to make it work. The same thing can happen with Linux.

It technically can but it's a lot more hassle.

As one example, on Linux most developer tools don't obey the system proxy configuration, each tool has its own archaic configuration for that. So we end up with a lengthy list of how to configure each tool for our MITM proxy. Sure, MITM proxies aren't ideal anyway but we're unfortunately stuck with this.

Many security tools have a Linux version but omit the GUI component where users can do stuff like request exceptions. Another big thing for developers because they often need that.

WiFi certificate auto provisioning is missing from the MDM tool we use. So it has to be all scripted. On windows and Mac we just click a box to turn it on. And this works differently on different distros.

So yeah as someone who builds Linux management I can imagine some companies don't bother.

I guess it depends on the kind of "Linux" you want. Corporate IT will probably roll out RHEL or similar to the desktops, take away your root access, and install a virus scanner too.

I worked at a bring your own distro place before, ISO certified. I don’t exactly recall what we had to install for compliance but one of them was Clam AV. So it’s possible.

I recall Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora being used. Relatively small shop though, like 40 devs.

Ironically we were contracting with ASML at the time and ended up having to work on Windows machines using Remote Desktop 99% of the time.

Ubuntu is way more popular for it.

RHEL is very popular on servers but not on desktops. Which is in part due to Red Hat themselves, they don't really do much to promote it for this usecase. Personally (as an admin) I don't mind because it's such a closed ecosystem anyway. They're always rent seeking which Canonical does a lot less. Canonical is always trying to sell us landscape though, but we never went for it because it doesn't solve any of the issues we have with the existing tooling.

Latest Fedora versions can also be regarded as a more modern, faster moving RHEL. Granted it doesn't come with a support agreement or the ability to get one (I just am guessing) so it may not tick all the checkboxes for corporate use.

Well it's ubuntu that the developers are asking for, and that is much better supported by our corporate tooling.

Personally I wouldn't touch redhat with a 10 foot pole after what they pulled with centos, however if my work did want to I'd make an effort on their behalf. They don't seem to though.

> I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

Peak Mac design was 20 years ago, before iPhone. That was where the reputation came from.

Since iPhone became Apple's darling, and especially since Steve Jobs died, the Mac UI has been systematically wrecked, year by year. iPhone design has also been systematically wrecked since Jobs died. Tim Cook clearly had no idea what he was doing when he put hardware designer Jony Ive in charge of software with iOS 7, something that Jobs never did with Ive.

For me KDE, I can't deal with gnome especially 3. But yeah moving to KDE from Mac was a breath of fresh air. Finally options again to configure my computer the way I want it.

Alt-tab is an app switcher, not a window switcher, and Finder is always running, hence, it appears in alt-tab

You can configure alt-tab on what menu it shows for which shortcut. There is an option to have a menu not showing minified windows, including Finder. While this doesn't eliminate the unclosable Finder non-sense, it's actually even handier in general manner as it allow to pick what windows should remain in my attention switch in current context.

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