this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
294 points (70.6% liked)
196
16732 readers
2097 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Too true. MacOS is the one place you can get a UNIX toolchain in a stable environment. If something works on my Mac, it works on my coworker’s Mac. If something works on Ubuntu but you’re using Nix… Uh, YMMV.
I love Linux, but if you’re gonna use it as a desktop OS, you pretty much accept that you now have a part-time job keeping up on Linux news to deal with the fact that each component of your system is in a perpetual state of “deprecated support for The Old Way, and experimental support for The New Way”.
MacOS is trash. An OS' primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
It's an OS designed for people writing word docs on their laptop at Starbucks, not for getting real work done.
Hell, try and enable viewing hidden files and folders in all finder and file picker windows. Oh wait, you can't!
You can use a terminal command to enable them in basic finder windows, but they'll still always be hidden in application's file pickers which use Finder, because lord forbid Apple treats their users like adults.
Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.
Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a11y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).
You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.
Half the people in this thread just have learned helplessness. They think that just because the OS doesn’t support what they want in the very first few seconds of using it that it doesn’t support it at all, yet those same people will spend hours fixing driver issues in Linux no problem. With karabiner-elements, hammerspoon, UnnaturalScrollWheels, and AltTab, you literally get everything you have on Linux and windows and you don’t get any of the jank from the other systems.
Mac is still terrible for gaming, and you don’t want to be running servers on it, so I actually use all three systems daily, but people consistently complain about Mac like it isn’t a Linux system.
Absolutely agreed that macs suck for gaming, but honestly Windows is super annoying too. It was getting better, but with all the spamware in the OS now it gets kind of annoying just to get games booted. Gamepass is cool, but it is very toxic for modding or anything because they like, lock down the new install locations to an insane degree, I couldn’t even copy a save file into there when I was trying to recover some save game state. And it’s yet another install locations for games/apps 🙃 like, why are there like 3+ locations for Program Files???
I’m honestly thinking about trying to run SteamOS on my desktop cause I really just need a launcher. I wanna get booted up any ready to play in like, under 30 seconds, and my Steam Deck is great for that.
I’m also looking to switch to Bazzite or SteamOS as soon as they make it available for non-steam decks
For me an os needs to do basic stuff by default, not by adding a billion 3rd party apps that inevitably break the next os update because they were using undocumented apis
Clipboard history, window snapping, showing a separate icon for every instance of a window (same app in 3 windows makes 3 icons on the taskbar), preview what that window is by hovering that.
Sure, you can do that with (mostly paid) third party apps, but I don't like wasting 3 days on setting an operating system in an usable state
So you make up a strawman
And then add another strawman onto it, in order to make your argument make any sense. None of the programs I listed are paid, they’re all open source, and it’s just as normal as doing any of the apt installs you have to do on Linux.
Setting up my Mac is literally as simple as running
dotfrom my dotfiles, which sets up every Mac setting, including things like making hidden files visible by default, hiding the Mac Dock by default, and more. On the other hand dealing with windows setup is a pain in the ass.Well for me it's the opposite. I set once my settings with the domain group policy a decade ago and in every single windows PC that I own I have the perfect settings from the out of the box experience as soon as the first login
And no need to set 30 key remaps with karabiner
I only have one key remapped with karabiner, and it’s transferable with a single JSON file so /shrug, sounds like maybe you just don’t understand Mac as well as you think you do. And I wasn’t just talking about system settings, like through group policy, I’m talking about anything that can be installed with a package manager. Yeah windows has scoop and winget, but they’re a pale imitation of brew, apt, yum, etc.
Most keyboard shortcuts are illogical (=differ too much from Linux/Windows) and too often require 3+ keys
Of course if you're used to "Ctrl+shift+command+3" to do a screenshot instead of just pressing the dedicated button on the keyboard and feel it natural, this doesn't apply to you
Windows shortcut is win shift s to take an equivalent of Mac (print screen is not the same thing). But to be clear you’re not really talking about specifics, you’re generalizing. On windows you get a specific list of shortcuts that are only possible with the windows key (and alt if you need to type special characters). And that list is exceedingly small. You need to use something like autohotkey to get others, and I’m not talking about for remapping. I’m talking about simple stuff like “toggle dock hiding on/off” or “adjust the screen brightness” (literally impossible on windows to change this without an external program). On Mac you have hundreds just to start with and then if you want you can jump into AppleScript or Automator which is built in. And if that doesn’t cover it, you use karabiner then. If you don’t like using multiple keys then map caps lock to cmd shift and then you’ve got an even shorter keyboard shortcut than windows.
You can believe that the defaults are illogical, but you can literally customize any of the default keyboard shortcuts on Mac, while that just isn’t true about windows. And on top of that you have shortcuts available that just aren’t there on windows (I literally chose the first two I saw in the Mac settings and then verified that they weren’t possible on Windows, I’m sure most of them aren’t even possible on windows without an external program).