New Mac Setup | Hacker News Reader

New Mac Setup

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33 pointsashishgandhi57 comments

I recently upgraded to Mavericks and I found it to be a buggy mess. SMB support for my Android phone? It's gone, God knows why. Installing the Dev tools (which for some reason were deleted during the update process from Mountain Lion) was incredibly slow and froze my machine, so I had to force a shutdown three times before managing to install everything.

The quality of software couldn't be worse, there's really not a single application client or cloud based that isn't a piece of crap. Even Google products (Youtube most of all) are full of (known) bugs that have been there for years (literally) and remain unfixed.

After more than 50 years of software development one would think we should've nailed the basics. At this point I'm hopeless, I don't think there will ever be reliable, high-quality software, it's just unattainable.

You should come work at YouTube and help us fix those bugs. It's a really nice place to work. You could even try to finagle a job description that lets you just fix the random stuff you're referring to :-)

Ha, is this the new way to apply for a job?

If you guys could just stop making it impossible for me to run through and watch new things posted to the channels I'm subscribed to I'd be 150% happier.

using it at a daily basis, have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

win ME was a buggy mess. mavericks too? hyperbole much? and oh, how much did you pay for it?

overall, software quality has increased a lot in the recent years. haven't seen a BSOD in ages. OS are rock solid nowadays.

I think that people sometimes look upon certain OS releases with rose-colored glasses. Snow Leopard is certainly one example, and I wouldn't be surprised if people felt that way about Windows XP (or maybe 7) as well.

Operating system quality has gone nowhere but up, and that's true for every player I can think of, both desktop and mobile. This includes Windows 8, embattled as it may be in the UI department, as I've found it fairly fast and stable.

Yeah, Windows XP was a 'disaster' at the beginning according to most people. I personally didn't think it was great until Service Pack 2.

> Installing the Dev tools (which for some reason were deleted during the update process from Mountain Lion) was incredibly slow and froze my machine, so I had to force a shutdown three times before managing to install everything.

Your hard drive might be failing.

Mavericks has much improved performance, and performance introspection tools, than Mountain Lion. If you feel your computer is generally slow or has poor battery life, running "sudo systemstats today" or powermetrics might help.

If there's a specific task where it has terrible system performance, hit the sysdiagnose key and reporting it later will be a lot more productive, if you want to do such a thing.

I've recently changed my hard drive, and no, my macbook pro 2009 does not run mavericks smoothly with 2GB of ram.

kernel_task takes 200 to 500MB of ram. Programs take age to start.

13-inch or 15-inch? If 13-inch, you may have a bad HD cable.

and whre do I get a new one ?

At an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple Store (https://locate.apple.com/). You can't usually visually identify a bad one, so I wouldn't buy one used.

2 GB of RAM is nowhere near enough for OS X anymore. You need 8 GB minimum and 16 GB if you are doing anything substantial.

that's why I don't like OSX. I prefer minimal OSes.

I have a 2007 MacBook Pro running Mavericks with 4GB of ram... no problems, Mavericks actually sped up the entire system and has brought an older machine I was getting ready to recycle back to life.

> Your hard drive might be failing.

And/or the filesystem might be corrupt. Run SMART Utility[1] (free trial). If it passes, run Verify Disk in Disk Utility on your disk(s) and volume(s). You'll need to boot to another volume (the recovery partition works) to repair the boot volume if needed.

[1]: http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

I've spent way too much time screwing around with my macbook for no reason, and I still didn't know about `systemstats`. thanks!

is there a (modern) list anywhere of OSX-included CLI tools like this?

Funny that I'm running Mavericks on a Hackintosh and I haven't had any issues in the last 3+ months.

I kernel panic about once a week (probably VMWare Fusion's kext). Wireless sometimes doesn't re-connect, often for extended periods of time. The location services icon always puts itself in the same place in the menubar, rather than take the leftmost slot, leaving weird gaps.

Mavericks is pretty crappy as far as OS X releases go. They need to slow down with all the nifty features. I'm all for yearly OS updates, but regressions are worrying.

I had lots of WiFi issues until I turned off bluetooth. Give it a go!

I had been having really bad issues with my 2010 iMac freezing up for a few seconds every couple of minutes since upgrading to Mavericks, and yesterday I finally decided to do something about it. I spent a good amount of time digging through Console.app and finding problem spots in the event logs, running tools like OnyX and CleanMyMac, and digging through various system files. Here's what I did to get it running like butter again:

* Reboot into recovery mode (hold cmd-R at boot) and run Repair Disk and Fix Permissions in Disk Utility (always a good idea just to catch any disk problems before you get going).

* Run EtreCheck (http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck) and remove anything described as a problem kext or problem login item. For me the main culprits were Soundflower (used with Audio Hijack) and old versions of Paragon NTFS and extFS.

* Open up Font Book, click All Fonts, select all, and pick File > Validate Fonts. Change the dropdown to "Warnings or Errors", and when the scan finishes choose all the fonts with warnings or errors and remove them. This actually fixed a lot of weird issues with Chrome and other apps.

* Run OnyX (http://www.titanium.free.fr/downloadonyx.php) and run pretty much every verification, maintenance, and cleaning task. Don't forget to go through the sub-tabs in each section. Also, read the help if you don't know what you're doing. Delete ALL the font caches (in the Cleaning tab) and reboot.

* Run CleanMyMac (or similar tool) to get rid of old logs, unused garbage, etc. Get rid of any old applications you don't use anymore and all their garbage too. Extensions Manager in CleanMyMac will help you track down login items that you don't know you're running.

Basically, the problem for me ended up being that I had been migrating my profile, development tools, apps, and other stuff from Mac to Mac since 2005. It seems like everything was mostly ok until Mavericks, when Apple clearly made a lot of changes under the hood and all that really old garbage all over my Mac ended up freaking the computer out.

After running all of the above stuff I haven't had any of the aforementioned issues. I'm planning to upgrade this old iMac pretty soon, and I'll definitely be starting fresh and not using Migration Assistant. Luckily, everything important these days is synced up with Dropbox or Google Apps (something that wasn't so easy in 2010) so it should just be a matter of reinstalling all my applications.

> Accessibility/Trackpad Options, and “Enable dragging”

Holy crap, it's in accessibility! How I cursed apple when I could not find it after upgrading. But now I already accustomed to "3-finger drag".

I'm confused what the option actually does. Isn't it the default behavior that if you click on anything and drag it, you drag it?

This isn't a "click", it's a double "touch-pad tap (no depress of the button)"

I've gotten so used to tap interaction, as opposed to "clicking", that I could easily work with a Mac now that had no "click".

I don't use the double-tap interaction (interferes with some games, and sometimes you get a deselect if you've multi-selected things on the screen) - but the three finger drag is wonderful.

[Edit: One exception - on bootup, before the OS is running, it won't recognize tap commands, and you have to click]

I find Ctrl to be a far better modifier key for window movement actions. BetterSnapTool FTW

I've been recently (December) upgraded to a similar rMBP (2GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD), coming from an early 2008 MBP 15" it really feels great, everything is incredible fast, almost instantaneous, but... I'm experiencing two VERY annoying problems with OSX Mavericks:

1) 2/3 times a week the whole system freezes up and I need to reboot

2) once a week the sound output stops working and I need to reboot

Googling around it seems I'm not the only one experiencing these issues, too bad I can't go back to OSX Leopard.

What's amazing about newer machines + SSD + ample RAM is that you start to perceive software slowness more than ever. Whereas before I wouldn't care if my terminal took 0.3s to open a new tab, now I want to get it down to .05s (which, using zsh completions, doesn't seem to be possible).

So true!

The sound output thing I found to be an issue with headphones - it'd happen when I was on headphones, closed the mac, took out the headphones, then open the mac up and woke it up again.

Interestingly enough, I picked up a pair of bluetooth headphones and the issue has entirely ceased to reoccur.

Still frustrating as hell, though.

Thanks! that's exactly what I'm doing every day, I use headphones too and plug/unplug them very frequently. I also never shutdown the mac, I just put it to sleep by closing the lid.

I've been doing the same for years with the old MBP (regularly coming to 30 days uptime without any itch) and always considered this the best feature (bulletproof sleep) that keeps me from going back to linux.

PS Ironically enough, just after posting my first comment the mac freezed up again...

I fixed the audio problem on my new Macbook Air by going to the Audio Midi Setup app in the Utilities folder. Click on Built in Output you may need to click the gear icon for "use this device for output" and/or unclick the checkboxes for mute.

Whoa, didn't know about Audio Midi Setup, I will look into it the next time it happens.

Thanks!

Mac OSX is the least customized OS I have ever done myself. I have very few customizations because the default settings and UI are fine. Coming from Ubuntu and Windows, I think Mac's UX is quite nice. The two exceptions are rename (I want to old Windows double-tap style) and the Preview program. I want to be able to view images forth and back with my arrow keys by default. The finder is also a little annoying sometimes but I didn't get a separate program but maybe I will.

One absolute must-correct issue in the future is Mac, Windows and all Linux distro should share same set of commands. Most Unix commands are available cross-platform but a few aren't. Unfortunately, that's not possible :( And forget about the difference between Windows commands and Linux commands. I could live with the difference, but, oh, it's 2014 and I hope one day we don't have to have live with difference.

Lastly,

I got a maxed-out MacBook Pro 15" (16G RAM, 1T SSD) thus dumping an estimated $1,000 profit into Apple’s cash hoard.

You sure? A 15" retina max 1TB and 16GB is $3000, not $1000. I think you meant an extra $1000 profit.

Re:

"I got a maxed-out MacBook Pro 15" (16G RAM, 1T SSD) thus dumping an estimated $1,000 profit into Apple’s cash hoard.

You sure? A 15" retina max 1TB and 16GB is $3000, not $1000. I think you meant an extra $1000 profit. "

I think he was using the 35% gross profit margin on $3,000 selling price to come up with a $1,000 gross profit. Actual Net Profit depends on many other factors, SG&A, R&D, etc...

That's a neat observation. Thanks.

>> an estimated $1,000 profit

> I think you meant an extra $1000 profit.

I'm not entirely sure what the difference is.

For programming, I like the font Anonymous Pro[1].

1: http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

And I like Source Code Pro.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro....

I work between Windows and OSX machines (and between Visual Studio and Sublime Text) and I just find it comforting to see the same typeface everywhere.

I'm using Anonymous Pro on Windows and OSX too. :)

Source Code Pro looks really nice!

I'm personally fond of Fantasque Sans Mono.

https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

I find homebrew-cask's font tap to be a particularly useful tool for managing fonts on OSX.

https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-fonts

I use Droid Sans Mono: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Droid+Sans+Mono

Although I've had to revert back to Menlo in IntelliJ as IDEA needs JDK 7 to get the Retina sexiness, and last I checked, there was a bug with JDK 7 that caused some fonts to render weird - in the case of Droid Sans Mono, I kept losing semicolons and exclamation marks.

I have mixed feelings on the glossy-everything trend that seems to be the norm these days. I suspect glossy is indeed better when the environment is right--but it often isn't. I went through the same thing buying a new TV for my sunroom which, as you might imagine from the name, has a lot of light during the day. I don't use the TV in that room much during the day and the glossy plasma is indeed wonderful at night, but matte screen have their advantages in sunlight and, I suspect, are the overall optimal choice for a lot of uses even though they've fallen out of favor.

I wasn't a fan of glossy displays either, but the screen on the rMBP seems a lot less reflective than the previous generations' Macbook Pros (the ones with build-in DVD drive). The reflections are much darker, and kind of hard to notice.

I have no mix - can't stand the glossy, especially for code work (or anything dealing with text). Glossy is great for photos and watching video, which I do very little of on my laptop screen. You can pry my last-matte-edition Macbook Pro from my cold dead hands!

Here is a similar kind of guide I wrote for a friend when he bought his first mac last year:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GIWl5333sxEZv5-cw5DGYSZC...

The margin on the top of the line Macbook pro that he got(1TB and 2.6ghz quad) is just insane. For an extra $700 you are increasing the SSD to a capacity you will never use and moderately increasing CPU clock. If you really need a 1TB drive you are going to go external anyway. You might as well go with the stock $2600 configuration as RAM limits are far more significant.

On the lower end there is little value anyway too as you are losing the integrated graphics, 8GB of memory and reducing the drive capacity to 256gb which might matter more if you have a lot of media. You might as well get the 13inch pro at that price and get a more portable laptop to boot.

I suspect he's not worried about an extra $700, and just because you don't use a TB doesn't mean he won't.

Here's my new Mac setup notes: https://github.com/SixArm/sixarm_mac_osx_installation_help

Feedback and pull requests welcome.

Curious, why do you have rbenv and ruby-build deprecated?

Edit: Nevermind, it looks like chruby and ruby-install are the new black.

> I used [Homebrew] to install ImageMagick (the only OS X tool I know of where you can resize pictures on the command line)…

There's the built-in command "sips" that comes on every Mac and has been around since at least OS X Lion (10.7). The name stands for "scriptable image processing tool", and the tool appears to use CoreGraphics to do its work.

More info here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

I agree with a lot of that, especially the key repeat speed. You can get it even faster than what the UI offers by manually setting it with defaults.

I would add to this list:

- BetterTouchTool (http://www.boastr.de/) with gestures set up for better browsing. Change tabs by swiping with three fingers to the right/left, close tab by swiping down, new tab by swiping up. Same thing for terminal.app tabs.

- iStat Menus for network/cpu monitoring.

> - BetterTouchTool (http://www.boastr.de/)

Also, three finger click -> middle click.

Middle clicking links will open the link in a new tab on almost every browser. Middle clicking on a tab will close it. These features are essential for me when I'm reading Hacker News or Reddit.

For open in new tab on a Mac, I use CMD-click. Takes two hands, but works without special setup and I usually have a hand near the keyboard anyway.

I did it that way for years—It's perfectly acceptable. But the triple click is just so much better for me. It's one of those little things that makes way more of a difference than you'd initially think. I'd encourage you to try it, even if it seems dumb.

keyremap4macbook provides a (slightly kludgey) UI for adjusting key repeat speed, among many other options. Also, it obviously lets you remap keys. I prefer to have the Right Option key on my MBA work as Enter.

"I’m too old now to not use Unix"

Add that to his list of memorable quotes.

I like the idea of his keymap for better quotes, but you don't need to do that.

“ is Option-[

” is Option-Shift-[

’ is Option-Shift-]

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