Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer.

For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version).

The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).

> [on windows 11] my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE.

I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS.

You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).

They rewrote their own SMB handler because they didn’t want the Samba license. Which means they get none of the improvements from the Samba code.

I didn’t know.. that explains so much

> It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow…

Is 1100+ MB/sec read and write (single 10 GbE interface) slow?

Now try to do something as simple as loading 100 video thumbnails in finder.

If you’ve never used SMB on a windows machine you have no idea. On windows it feels like an extension of the local disk.

it's wild to me that Apple has retained SMB as the default option on macos for over a decade. There are plenty of faster/more secure protocols that are still widely recognized, yet they're still encouraging use of a protocol that could expose user data without so much as an Apple-y bother dialog about the consequences

I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.

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