Hacker News Reader

Comment by natpalmer1776 | Hacker News Reader

Which is why I wish Apple would support Linux out of the box on their M-series hardware.

I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level. I need a fucking Hole Hog for the work I do.

There is a time and a place for every tool, and sometimes the hands holding the tool influence this more than an expert would care to admit, who instead say things like “you’re doing it wrong!” to admonish users who didn’t even know there was a difference between the tool they held and the one they needed.

View on HN

I'd feel about 100x safer with my child using MacOS than any Linux distro. Linux comes with much more footgun built in than any commercial OS.

Yeah, that’s why you hand them the residential drill (Mac)

How so? In what way would some immutable distro with GNOME be less safe than MacOS?

If it's their own computer, what better way for them to learn than by making mistakes? And if it's a shared computer, Linux container tools (e.g. https://github.com/containers/toolbox) would let them "sudo rm -rf /" in their own environment without jeopardizing the base system or other users.

> I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level.

rm -rf / would like a word.

You forgot sudo and an admin entitled user’s password.

If it's really a Hole Hawg, you run as root, or at least passwordless sudo.

I thought they were calling the residential drill a hole hawg.

To your point though, not everything in Mac can be solved via root user privilege. SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.

> SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.

macOS in its default configuration may not be the HH, but if SIP removes those limitations it is still available.

As someone who (a) does some tech support for family, but also (b) uses a MacBook for sysadmining Linux servers, but kind of happy with the current balance. I don't think I've run into SIP limitations, so perhaps I'm not an 'advanced' enough user of macOS (MacPorts generally works for the 'extras' I need on top of base macOS).

Well shit, I went to verify my litany of QoL complaints that couldn’t be resolved via disabling SIP and turns out there has since been a solution for for the main one (Gatekeeper) and the remaining issues boil down to personal particularities.

So I rescind “needing” a hole hawg and correct it to “strongly prefer or desire” a hole hawg. Mainly because I shouldn’t have to rip apart a magic keyboard to embed a touch ID module into a 3D printed case for a standalone fingerprint reader module.

What's stopping you from reverse engineering that module?

Same thing that’s stopping me from building my own computer chips using a home lithography setup and clean room.

Yeah sure dude they’re going to do nation-state level silicon attacks against the key material in that sensor

What about an off the shelf fingerprint reader.

Doesn’t work with touch ID.

macOS supports smart cards for unlock. And the YubiKey Bio has fingerprint authentication. So I think you can do your own kinda Touch ID with the multiprotocol YubiKey Bio version.

Thats cool to know. I already tore apart a magic keyboard and stuck the fingerprint reader in a 3D printed enclosure but I’ll definitely try that if it breaks.

That's a drilling rig

Reply on news.ycombinator.com