How I ended up with Mac
tirania.org
tirania.org
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug
A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.
Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).
So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8.
I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form...
> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.
On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.
On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.
On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.
I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'
> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:
- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.
- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding
If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
It looks like some versions/builds of rsync are encoding-aware (e.g., http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-fi...), although some recent builds may not be (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html).
With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder.
Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.
If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.
I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.
Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.
Uh, so does Finder. What are you talking about?
That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.
Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.
Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).
[2]: http://www.cogx.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...
I think the above translates to "no, not really."
At least there are very easy solutions for Finder. At the very least, you should check out the free XtraFinder extension.
At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser.
Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
I find the current version (in mountain lion) to be quite reasonable though.
ducks
The brokenness of the Finder affects users of all stripes. You don't need to be especially technical. It has been reviled for years and years by developers and non-developers alike.
My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.
This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.
> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
That's pretty minor.
a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.
c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.
(I know how to access the source files BTW).
So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?
> b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.
What were you trying to do?
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
man mdls
No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent
Automator + Photoshop.
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
This shot me badly.
The whole solution is just bad.
In what way?
> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.
What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.
The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.
Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.
I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.
Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?
I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.
I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"
iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.
That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).
>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).
I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?
>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre
Never had that.
>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
Ever thought of upgrading it?
This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Incorrect in what parallel universe?
>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").
Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.
>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
iPhoto IS one. As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages. iLife is just a marketing name. iTunes used to be part of iLife too. Now they're just apps, apps that 99.9% of people that purchase a Mac will find on their computers pre-installed when they open them. That was half my point: that iPhoto today is just about as much a part of a default installation of Mac OS X as any.
>Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
Now that we've gotten the fact that iPhoto will almost certainly be on my machine when I open it, it should be clear to you that it doesn't matter which of these I am. For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience. Drawing an imaginary line around a subset of applications and calling them "OS" or "not OS" does not take away from the fact that a bad iPhoto experience will understandably contribute to a bad Mac experience. As such, both by technical and laymen's understandings of OS, the critique is valid.
Edit: My mistake, iPhoto is included in the server one as well. So it turns out iPhoto comes installed on every single Mac.
However, reinstall MacOS, and you will notice it doesn't install iLife.
Similarly, most Windows computers seem to ship with that 30 day trial of MS Office these days; does that mean that 30 day trials of MS Office are part of Windows?
Sure, it's a non-part-of-the-core-OS, bundled for free, easily replaceable, with 10s of alternatives, peripheral to using a Mac, part of the Mac experience.
To return to our duck-ing topic, what does that have to do with OS X being bad or "not just working"?
If you had to bring up a bundled, non-essential, app to make your point of OS X not working well, then one has to conclude it works mighty fine overall.
And it's even worse than that: you haven't actually even made any point against iPhoto. Just that you don't like it's filesystem abstraction. Which is neither here, not there.
I believe you are well aware that you are being disingenuous by treating iPhoto as some sort of unrelated third party application that you have no idea why anyone would bring up out of be blue in a discussion about OS X. Who cares if its "non essential", most of the stuff in OS X is completely non-essential (ahem dashboard, photo booth, even mail considering most people use webmail).
Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.
We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.
And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.
[1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted.
Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up.
I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.
With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk.
I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier!
When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).
At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder.
Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises.
Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.
I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ?
Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?
... or right click dock finder and choose connect to server
open works with loads of protocols, not just files, for example 'open vnc://host' works out of the box.
Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision.
On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.
Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003).
"It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work.
And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations.
>I suppose I'm just not the target market.
Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.
Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc...
My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere.
Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues.
These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.)
Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.
I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. Power management rocks, battery life is good (8 hours on my 2007 Lenovo T61!), the hardware is damn cheap, the licenses cost me virtually nothing, literally everything I plug into it works, the tooling is pretty damn good, utils I wrote for Windows NT4 literally 14 years ago still just work flawlessly. My Linux machine is just a VirtualBox VM.
Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works. Email is the same everywhere, all the apps just works, plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!), Nokia Drive just works, maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down), talks to exchange without problems, is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese), opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.
Seriously, it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days.
Bear in mind I am coming from a background on hardcore UNIX machines (big Solaris, HP-UX machines), through FreeBSD to Linux to OS-X.
The worst pain I had was with Solaris (on Tadpole SPARCbook) and just about everything Apple, particularly their unreliable hardware (4 Macs returned for repair!), app compatibility problems, piss poor battery life on iPhone 3/4, shit crock of a POSIX environment and shoddy attempt at online services.
Try migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Whole wheels of cheese are moved around and the flavor has changed... :)
I'm on a 2007 built Lenovo T61 which I can actually see lasting until 2020 as well the way it's going.
My only complaint is a "go back" problem, where opening something like a media file from the desktop opens a Metro/Modern app, and closing the app takes you to the Start Screen rather than back to your desktop. Otherwise, I spend my time on the dual screen desktop mode, using my programs, just like I did in 7. Only now with improved dual monitor support.
I call shenanigans.
> Email is the same everywhere,
...as with all mobile OSes.
> all the apps just works,
In contrast with iOS? I'm not buying it. "Apps just work" is Apple's selling point for their iDevices and that reputation wasn't just bought by their marketing department.
> plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!),
Pix or it didn't happen. What MP3s was your iPhone - with it's iPod internals - unable to play?
> Nokia Drive just works,
iCloud, Dropbox, and SkyDrive are available on iOS. Nokia Drive is better than all of those?
> maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down),
iOS has Apple and Google native maps apps. What specifically is better about Windows maps than either of those?
> talks to exchange without problems,
...just like iOS, which licenses ActiveSync from Microsoft.
> is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese),
Can't argue that.
> opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.
...just like iOS. I'll be honest: I'm having a hard time buying most of those examples as they run contrary to my own (and anecdotally, most others') experiences.
Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I've had the device freeze at least 2-3 times a week as well. In the year I've been using Windows Phone, IE mobile has crashed twice and the device hasn't failed once (Lumia 710).
Won't play mp3s - this is rife. The ID3 parser on iOS devices is a piece of shit: http://www.google.com/#q=iphone+wont+play+mp3s This has been known for literally YEARS and plagues all apple devices from iPod, to touch to iPhone to Mac.
Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is? It's not a Skydrive/DropBox clone. It's a fully blown 100% FREE offline turn by turn satellite navigation and mapping platform akin to your average satnav. It's pretty amazing and is a deal breaker for iOS:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/nokia-lumia-smartphones-get-maps...
Regarding Apple and Google native maps, see above again.
iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.
Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.
> Won't play mp3s - this is rife.
All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.
> Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is?
I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat... then.
> iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.
"My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."
You know, I'm not even really that much of an iOS fan. I've been eyeing my coworker's Galaxy with increasing envy. As a Linux developer, it's looking more attractive to me by the day. It's just that some of your claims ring hollow and a bit outrageous, like if I were to criticize a Lumia 920 by saying that it crashes hourly. That just doesn't jibe with anything I've seen online or heard from friends.
I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. One is an Exchange MVP as wlel. This is a regular problem with all iOS devices connected to Exchange. We've had a large insurance company who is a client ban all iOS devices as well due to this issue. They've switched to Android.
> All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.
Look harder.
> I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat.... then.
Absolutely nothing like any of them. I've spent about £200 on iOS navigation apps and nothing comes close. Only a real piece of dedicated hardware is anything like it for accuracy and reliability.
> "My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."
This is not a mail server issue. By elimination, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, Blackberries, Outlook on desktop all work fine. The only odd one out is iOS.
This is surprisingly common. Most people just don't talk about it as they don't give a shit or don't get annoyed by app crashes etc. They assume that's the status quo, then shout at their ops team who sort it out.
Color me surprised ...
My point is that we're citably competent all the way through.
1) People who don't use the Microsoft technology stack.
2) People who use Microsoft's proprietary technology stack, and then get annoyed at products that fail to interoperate with it seamlessly, despite the fact that it's undocumented, proprietary, and notoriously difficult to interoperate with successfully.
There are very few people who use MS stack and don't get annoyed at interoperability concerns, because those people realize that the fault lies with Microsoft, and stop using Microsoft's stack.
Nokia Drive is not like the apps you listed. It's free, high quality, world wide navigation. On my iPhone I use Apple Maps right now. It has potential but besides the already discussed issues my number one annoyance is that it's absolutely not offline! I got bit by this twice, the app is completely useless without a sufficiently fast connection.
You and I have had vastly different experiences.
I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day.
The default command shell sucks rocks, so I'm using (or attempting to use) cygwin, specifically zsh. I have no access to tmux, and while screen works it is not my preferred multiplexer. Even under zsh, though, the typical Ruby commands (ruby/irb/gem/etc.) have to be run with their .bat equivalents, which is a needless pain. The latest issue is with something related to OpenSSL, and I'm still digging through that one.
These are all issues that have been specific to Windows. I ran this exact same code with zero problems on my home OS X box not 4 hours ago. git pull/bundle/rails server, good to go. On Windows this has taken the better part of a day to get going.
You sound like an astroturfer, honestly. "I'm honest, I use other systems. It's just that they all are just awful compared to Windows. Here are generic reasons why, with few specifics."
> shit crock of a POSIX environment
What does this even mean? OS X is POSIX certified. Windows is not. Are you saying POSIX is crap, or that OS X's implementation of it is? Either way I would challenge you to back up that statement up. OS X is the best Unix I have personally had experience using.
I'm not sure what POSIX certified means, but Windows is UNIX in the same way Mac OS X is...
Not to be confused with Unix, Unix-like, or Linux.
POSIX (pron.: /ˈpɒzɪks/ poz-iks), an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posix
The old MS POSIX subsystem was replaced by the amusingly named SFU (Services for UNIX). Then that got replaced by the bought-in Interix.
Mac OS X is UNIX because it's certified under the Single UNIX Specification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
Windows is not in any way UNIX. There aren't even any certified Linux distros (AFAIK). Mac OS X is UNIX.
Try PowerShell ISE v3 if you want a shell for windows. That's actually a pretty scary powerful bit of kit:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4...
I think you are trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver by expecting it to be the same. Embrace the platform's strengths, not try turning it into UNIX and whinge when it doesn't work.
OSX POSIX Certified? That means typically "buggy as fuck but the API is complete". That's as far as the certification goes. They couldn't even get rename(2) to behave properly for about 8 years. Google it. So many little bugs like that shot me for ages. That and the fact the whole damn CPU architecture changed one day.
As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.
OSX, meanwhile, is still Unix under the hood. I'm frankly stunned that someone coming from a straight FreeBSD background wouldn't value that highly. But your experiences with hardware, while I'm sure legitimate, do not mirror my own. I've owned two MacBook Pros (starting with the first Unibody model) for the last 6 years and both have been rock solid daily drivers, and "functional and uneventful," but also very nice to use—not really boring.
To each their own, is the moral of all these stories. If Windows is gaining stability and OSX continues to be high quality, it just gives everyone more options and lowers the barrier-to-entry of computing.
Twenty years ago you had to invest in your desktop and build it yourself, and laptops were rare. Ten years ago only nerds knew how to maintain Windows. Now you carry an always-connected computer in your pocket and a 4.9 pound supercomputer on your back. No part of this is bad.
Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems.
OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.
OS X userland is pretty stock BSD. It may be unfamiliar if you are used to Linux.
Windows 7 really is quite good, and I don't much care for the directions Mac OS X is heading.
For instance if you go to Mono's download page to checkout the options, the only Linux distribution supported by them is OpenSuse: http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html
Of course one could argue that Debian (and Ubuntu that relies on Debian's repository) has a culture of packaging stuff by themselves and indeed in the case of Mono there are people that do just that. But those packages are always behind the current version and you can't blame the maintainers for that. And lots of software companies, including Google and Mozilla, are providing packages for Debian/Ubuntu for the latest versions by themselves. It's actually the norm with Ubuntu to setup third-party PPAs that provide packages for something missing from the main repository.
So Miguel here complains about fragmentation on the Linux desktop. It's funny, because they ignore the largest distributions around. At least if instead of OpenSuse they supported Red Hat, I would understand.
Also, my experience with OS X has not be so pleasant. Miguel is a damn good developer, but he must be using a really simple toolchain.
When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily.
Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything. Linux can be painful sometimes, but for most problems you can find documented fixes.
Also, he's a little out of date. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me on my Thinkpad for the last couple of months since I got my current laptop. Of course, I preferred a model with Intel HD 4000 instead of a Geforce, so a little research into hardware may be needed to ensure good compatibility, but on the other hand you can't run OS X on anything else other than a couple of Macbook models. Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.
As a non-Mac-user (and fellow ThinkPad user!) that occasionally gets roped in to that crazy land, I feel your pain. MacPorts seemed the most useful option before, simply because it seemed a direct port (heh) of the BSD ports system. Honestly the whole thing reminded me of trying to get stuff to work on Solaris 10-15 years ago.... if you can just get your compiler working it works great, just set up /my-usr over here and make sure nothing from the real system ends up in $PATH.
Lately I heard that MacPorts isn't cool any more so I didn't use it for my most recent Mac-oriented client project that needed some installs. I am a stubborn goat, but if I've learned one thing it's that when the trendy open source crowd on Mac wanders off, good luck getting anything to work, especially because Apple loves to change things. So I looked around and it seems Fink is a really nice option. So far everything went great. If you are familiar with Debian it's like that, and it carefully segregates everything into /sw, so just make sure /sw/{bin,sbin} are first in $PATH and you'll be good. I was recently reminded of Gentoo Prefix and wish I'd tried that out.
Now here is the thing that cracks me up. I am of all things a Gentoo partisan. My workstations? Gentoo. Servers for my business? Gentoo. Client systems? Gentoo. LAN server for a moderately technical friend? Gentoo. And I do get some gentle mockery from friends for how much of my CPU time is spent on compiling. Yet here are the Mac acolytes, with the most consistent hardware and OS platform one could ever hope for, and they always have a fetish for compiling things from source. Are they showing off that they know how to do "./configure && make && make install"? Well congratulations, you got my respect for that, now please make binary packages. I mean shit, the only reason I am into Gentoo is I got tired of that rigmarole and managing $CFLAGS manually on my precious Slackware boxen.
I've had no trouble installing Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Memcached on Mac OS X, mostly binary installers are available, or you can just use homebrew for stuff like memcached if not, I use rvm for Ruby as it's easier and ties in with server setups but you can install from source. So be aware that if you have run into problems it is not a universal failing of Mac OS X and was specific to you/your setup. I haven't seen many glitches with the above stack, and answers are usually googlable if you do run into something (for example after installing memcached I googled how to set up the plist homebrew provides to run it on startup). Can't say I've noticed much difference with upgrading/installing packages on linux, but then I tend to manage servers rather than desktops there.
I agree the package manager situation is more sane on Linux though if you're using open source code; it's one of the things Linux gets right (when it works), as opposed to commercial operating systems. That doesn't mean it's impossible or even difficult to use an open-source stack on Mac OS X though, quite the opposite.
I'm surprised to hear this, as I've had the opposite experience with a similar toolchain, especially since the advent of Homebrew. What problems are you running into exactly?
Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything.
Again, never had this experience. I would love to hear how you're managing to FUBAR your Mac.
Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.
Have all of these issues been on a Hackintosh? If so, that might explain things ...
Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.
Having said that, most things do work, and people are friendly and easy to reach.
Most GNU packages just work, shouldn't you find what you are looking for elsewhere.
I think Mac Os X, (or just OS X now adays), is the greatest platform for free software ever!
My reason for starting out with a Mac was Applescript (http://macscripter.net) and inter application communication IPC. I haven't regretted that a single day.
The problem comes when you start wanting to use things that aren't on Macports, and are only on homebrew (or maybe fink). But homebrew won't work with macports! So either you have to install one package or the other manually, or you have to install both macports and homebrew, which means that not only are you dealing with an unsupported setup, but you're also dealing with using two separate package managers for the same operating system.
Oh, and don't forget that anything installed via the App Store is completely independent of all of the above.
As a Linux user, I find this concept mind-boggling. I don't have time to keep track of a thousand different package managers. I just want one that handles everything.
You install libraries and console stuff from homebrew, gui applications from app store and forget about macports.
The experience I had was that everything that was a royal PITA on nix at the time (web browsing, audio, skype, video, photo management, suspend/resume, printing) "just worked" on the Mac. Hurray!
But the problem I had was that the unixy stuff stuff I needed to do my job (X11 across multiple monitors, emacs, serial console control, local command-line tools, etc) did not just work, and was more a PITA to maintain on MacOSX than the flashy stuff was to maintain on nix. The final straw was when I upgraded to Leopard, and multiple monitor support in X11 was totally hosed.
In the end, I wound up giving the iMac to my in-laws, building another whitebox for 1/2 the price of the iMac, and I have been happy ever after.
Color me surprised.
Edit: vvvv I stand corrected.
Double Edit: What exactly do you mean, anyway? Things like http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2002020601120OPGNMS, dated 2010, seem to indicate he's still active within GNOME.
Linux is the one place I've never been concerned with library versioning, poor centralized software repos, etc. Am I missing something?
It is hardly valid to compare that to a bog standard release of an OS.
If you are reading this and for some reason have not tried Linux, this experience is not remotely representative.
The laptop I am typing this on (Thinkpad, Ubuntu) - sleep works, audio works, camera works, wifi just works, 3g JUST WORKS, printers just work - better than in Windows, DisplayPort just works, USB devices just work - and I have been running and upgrading the OS for several years.
In fact I can't see how distro incompatibilities or fragmentation affects a desktop user when you're using one distro. Icaza use case is far for the average desktop use case I think.
I'm both Ubuntu (Dell) and Fedora (Dell) user, and I don't have/suffer any of the problems described in the post. I'm a developer and I install new packages/tools from time to time, with no problems.
The one thing that stands out to me the largest is A2DP, idk if this is exclusive to the MBP(late 2011) but it is simply broken. Works 1/2 the time and when it does the quality is horrible.
Another annoyance is theme engine is non existent.
My favorite is the trackpad + osx, such a pleasure to use compared to any other laptop.
With that said i love both windows & osx, each has there advantages.
I actually had to look up the name, but it is a bluetooth profile for passing audio over bluetooth. I personally use it to connect my MBP to my audio system wirelessly. It barely works even when the distance between between the MBP and the receiver is less then 3 feet.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_profile#Advanced_Audi...
And the Mac achieves 2/3 of that. It made Unix not suck. It provides most of the open source goodies on top (using something like brew). And it also provides the kind of proprietary software that simply can't be matched by available open source software (like most of the Adobe tools).
Although I can sense some bitterness in his recent essays, he simply acknowledges the fact that the classic Linux desktop won't make it. (However I think it may actually succeed even on the desktop in the form of something Android related.)
As I see it, there will be a peaceful coexistence of proprietary and free software. Free software succeeds a) where collaboration is needed (Webkit) and b) to provide the kind of pluggable modules that OO programming promised to deliver but never did. Just think of all the stuff on github that you probably pull into your projects all the time.
Good hardware can make a huge difference in the experience whatever you are running. I sometimes think people don't give enough credit to Apple for the power of sweet homogenous hardware to make a whole OS/software ecosystem that much smoother. Or maybe they give too much credit to apple for the other parts of the stack.
I run a Scientific Linux desktop at work and have a MacBook Pro for personal stuff, with Virtualbox for (mostly) Ubuntu. Granted Ubuntu is pretty easy wherever, but Virtualbox setup for me tends to have fewer kinks. I wonder if it's down to the same environment homogeneity.
Props to Miguel de Icaza for writing this. Talk about being transparent.
EDIT: typos
> I despise widescreen displays, but I had gotten resigned to them. Until now. 3:2, baby!
Who knew.
I bet Miguel is more like me than most of you, that is, living in a unix/linux terminal for the last 15 years or more - AND doing file management in that terminal!
I've also gone to the Mac from unix/linux as my primary machine as it just works. What I mean by that is suspend/resume, wifi, and all that stuff that you shouldn't think about anymore.
Sure, all I use on it is a browser, iTerm, emacs and dev tools installed from MacPorts, but it provides me with a good environment - that just works. Updates have never broken anything for me - not even the OS updates. Can't say the same about Linux.
The base OS is rock f-ing solid. All my unix stuff works flawlessly. Time spent f'ing around with drivers and random upgrade issues? Zero.
It even syncs with my phone (iPhone), which happens to work great!
Finder? Who gives a crap? That's what the terminal is for!
As for upgrade issues... I apt-get upgrade weekly because things are getting fixed. OS X is still shipping the same out-of-date copy of BSD tools they've been using for years.
Without noticing, I stopped turning on the screen for my Linux machine during 2012. By the time I moved to a new apartment in October of 2012, I did not even bother plugging the machine back and to this date, I have yet to turn it on.
That represents to me exactly how new technology is adapted and how old ones die off. Fascinating.
I don't see why you'd spend hours writing a system utility to close apps on a Mac that provides a perfectly easy to use keyboard shortcut.
Yes, so badly that I even wrote a small menu bar ("tray") utility labeled as "[ X ]". When clicked, it quits an app with the currently active window. But well, this is not an ideal replacement...
I'm just very used to quit an app when I'm done working with it, no matter how soon I'll need to re-open it...
Retina display is so much better for reading papers. There is no way I'd use even a 1080p display given a choice! It has only given me minor issues so far (failed to wake up in some external display combination in rare occasions). Knock on wood :)
Although after using Explorer again I think Finder is no where near as bad.
That developer has always been very controversial in the Linux world amongst serious Linux users. He's been trying to poison Linux with mono and that was a huge lot of energy lost (I'm sure some people will still come here and defend mono and saying how great the CLR is and why C#/F# is the future, etc. But sadly for these the world changed quite a bit since then [cough, iOs, cough, Android]).
Now what I find very ironic is that basically he says that in 2005 OS X rocked because it had no virus, while Windows was full of viruses and that this is why he switched to OS X.
And what do we have today? A major OS X vulnerability issue due to Java applets which infected a gigantic number of devs, giving access inside major target companies like FaceBook to bad guys.
Besides that I can't possibly even begin to understand how OS X would be better than Linux for a developer.
On Linux I can install Java in a user account without needing to be root.
On Linux I can install a browser in another user account, which has no access to Java at all.
On Linux I can display that browser from that other user account to my graphical session if I want to.
On Linux I can have several users and two graphical sessions (or more) simultaneously and switch from one to the other if I want to.
On Linux I can set per-user ID firewalling rules using nothing else but iptables (or whatever suits you):
iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW,RELATED -m user --user-ID 1001 -j ACCEPT
Here only one user (the one with the account which only has a web browser installed, no Java, no nothing, just a browser) is allowed to emit trafic to port 80.
etc.
There are just so many benefits from using Linux as a dev. Security, performances, control, mutliple graphical sessions / mixing windows from several user accounts, KVM, etc.
There's simply no way the walled garden that OS X is allows me to trivially do all this.
Once again: we're talking about someone who's always been controversial in the Linux community because of its love/hate relationship with Linux.
Honestly I don't want of a Linux developer who's telling the world that OS X on the desktop is better for dev than Linux.
Thankfully virtually all of the others Linux developers out there are eating their own dog food.
And who are these others Linux developers? The ones who didn't try to poison Linux with MS technologies.
Also, OS X can run multiple sessions, install a browser with no root access and Java is not installed by default.
But I see you are one of those users that drop their misguided wisdom and ignore all the replies, so I won't expect you to reply here either and keep believing your false facts.
They want to protect users with Secure Boot, and still they get a lot of crap for it.
Remember Palladium? That would've stopped malware in its tracks. It was railed against big time, and later the same people gave rave reviews the iPad/iPhone more even though Apple implemented the Palladium spec pretty much to the letter.
Also, wasn't Miguel supposed to be Microsoft's shill or something for introducing Mono for Linux and pushing C# on Linux and Mac? Now here he is, selling a Mac!
Maybe he was just a technology lover all along!
I am sure the anti-Microsoft folks' heads are exploding with the contradictions!
No. That's only to make it difficult/impossible to boot anything that wasn't signed with a Microsoft key. It protects against one kind of rootkit and that's it.
> Apple implemented the Palladium spec pretty much to the letter.
Apple wasn't trying to force the PC industry to implement Palladium (or UEFI Secure Boot). If you buy Apple, you are buying Apple. When I buy Dell, I don't expect to be forced to also buy Microsoft (although I often am).
> Also, wasn't Miguel supposed to be Microsoft's shill or something for introducing Mono for Linux and pushing C# on Linux and Mac?
People change careers.
> Maybe he was just a technology lover all along!
Maybe I just don't agree with his taste for technologies.
He tried to poison Linux using Mono and that turned out to be an utter fiasco.
So he failed in destroying Linux and he's pissed that he failed. As a result he's now trying to cast some more bad light on Linux: this time Linux isn't an OS whose purpose would be to run CLR app but an inferior desktop/laptop app which shouldn't be used because OS X would be superior.
I'm a very long time Linux user (since the Slackware) days and honestly I've got zero love for that person (and, no, I'm not a Gnome user).