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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing software is ridiculous. And, yes, Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.

I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.

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It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.

I went through similar feelings switching to the Mac ecosystem (from Linux) in 2012... But I quickly settled on some tools I wouldn't be without now.

Finder is terrible, but I switched for Forklift early on. I think it's amazing, so much better than the Gnome and KDE file managers I used before. It covers so many bases, from being a twin-pane orthodox manager, directory comparer and synchroniser, bulk regex renamer, etc. Handles local directories as well as remote ones via SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Google Drive, SMB, NFS, etc. And switching to Alfred was a real pleasure. I could see where Gnome Do took inspiration from, but it's a pale imitation. I also installed iTerm2 early on, and I use it to this day. Easily the best fit terminal for my purposes.

Maybe because you can open a terminal, do port install mc and then ignore the Finder most of the time :)

I do most of my work in the terminal, so the Finder is less of an issue than it would be otherwise. I like for the desktop environment to be nice, but I don't necessarily need it for much more than managing the browser and terminal windows most of the time. But, the weird layout of the filesystem and more limited terminal environment on macOS is also uncomfortable. In some cases, it's merely different rather than worse, but the overall experience for me is notably less comfortable than Linux.

“Weird for the sake of being weird”…you know Finder existed first, right?

Not true by any stretch, though parent didn't mention any competitor

MacOS's current Finder dates from 2001. Earlier versions of "Finder" were a completely different piece of software - different code, different interface, different UI metaphor. File manager software predating it:

  Windows Explorer
  GNOME/Nautilus
  KDE/Konqueror
  X11/xfm (X File Manager)
  sundry proprietary Unix workstations

All of the above interfaces share the same interface lineage as Mac OS, lying as they all do downstream of Xerox PARC. And all have converged on the same interface principles - visible path, a button to ascend to the parent directory, etc.

Everyone who comes to Finder from anywhere else complains. Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.

MacOS's current Finder dates from 2001

Arguably it dates from NeXTSTEP so 1989.

We’re talking about the UI here, not the binary executable. Finder was extensively reworked in 2001 from the file manager in NeXT to be much closer to the original Finder, and most of the complaints here are about UI decisions taken from the original Finder, released in 1984. That predates Windows (not just Windows Explorer, which is from ten years later), Nautilus (created by Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac team to be like Finder!), and the Unix variants, even the venerable xfm, which dates from the early 1990s.

The PARC interface (by which I guess you mean the Xerox Star) had significant differences, and I think would confuse any modern computer user far worse than the Finder. The Lisa was closer to the Star but the Mac used a simplified model that just equated files to icons.

Source: I lived through this process and used all of these for actual work at some point. The Finder’s influence on GUI file management was rather like the iPhone’s influence on phone management.

> Finder was extensively reworked in 2001 from the file manager in NeXT to be much closer to the original Finder, and most of the complaints here are about UI decisions taken from the original Finder, released in 1984.

Why would they ignore all the lessons learned between 1984 and 2001?

That's the reason why most people complain about Finder today.

same. now that there are finally good linux laptops with good battery and haptic touchpads i'm having a bit of buyers remorse, and will probably pick one up soon.

such a waste of damn good hardware though

Who currently makes a decent haptic trackpad? I have an Asus with gorgeous OLED screen, good battery life etc and fucking GARBAGE trackpad.

was thinking either the framework or xps 14, but have not use their trackpads extensively but both haptic

You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!

Hi, can you elaborate on this? Why not use Asahi Linux?

I can't speak for the person you've asked, but, I have an M5 Macbook Pro and Asahi Linux only recently got support for M3 Macs, and that support is marked WIP on most features: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/

I assume it'll be a couple of years before Asahi is an option for my machine.

I'd love to try Asahi some day, but it only supports older hardware up to M3 for now and feature support is rather fragmented: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/. As it's a small and slow moving project, it'd also unfortunately mean living with all the bugs and quirks for a long time if you choose it.

What you could do instead is just set up your favorite Linux distro in an arm64 VM and run it with UTM (a popular qemu wrapper). Works nearly flawlessly! Very usable as a daily development setup. I connect it to an external monitor and keyboard and can't believe it's not a Linux box most of the day. They even got virtualized Vulkan (almost) working now. Switching between VMs and host is trivial and you have proper virgl acceleration in VMs without fighting a lot of nonsense like I had in the past with virt-manager on Linux hardware - if you like to develop in VMs like me, this alone would justify switching from a Linux box to a Mac.

Virtualization costs me ~10-15% in multicore performance - still a bargain considering how far ahead Mac hardware is compared to anything x86. Linux arm64 is very well supported by open source these days. Just proprietary software is often behind e.g. Zoom, Slack are still missing native binaries but you could run them in a browser.

Here's a more detailed experience report (though a bit dated) from another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508 https://blog.disintegrator.dev/posts/dev-virtual-machine/

Awesome write-up, thank you! This makes me want to try this out as well.

>My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop.

I see people justify their Mac purchases this way all the time, but IMO it's just cope and not their actual primary reason for making that decision. I've never seen where the math actually worked out where the price/performance actually made Apple made sense.

Have you looked at the CPU performance of Apple Silicon lately?

I'm still not convinced there is some product where the price/performance justifies it.

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