[HN Gopher] Return of the Mac (2005)
___________________________________________________________________
Return of the Mac (2005)
Author : jnieminen
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-07-04 10:14 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office,
| Adobe, and a more polished experience than Microsoft or Linux
| offered at the time.
|
| My friend bought one of the last G3 iBooks. It ran Mac OS X 10.2
| that was arguably the first "stable" release of Mac OS X.
|
| I had such a great experience I bought a 15" October 2005
| PowerBook as my first Apple laptop.
|
| It was under performant compared to Intel offerings of the day
| but I badly wanted Mac OS X. I was thrilled when I could buy a
| 2007 MacBook Pro to replace it with a Core2Duo processor.
|
| Now, the M1 MacBook Air is so unbelievably fast and power
| efficient.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted
| Office, Adobe,
|
| I used both MS Word, Excel and Adobe Framemaker on Windows in
| the 1990s (much less 2005) with very few problems - I was
| really impressed at how well such a complex piece of software
| as Frame ran on Windows, and I don't think it now supported on
| the Mac.
| pvtmert wrote:
| What motivates hackers like me is not the freedom. Quite opposite
| actually. Hacking the device require some kind of lock-in.
|
| So, when you achieve something, it will worth the effort.
| willswire wrote:
| The timing of this article is interesting - I feel that the same
| thing is happening again with the advent of Apple Silicon.
| LucidLynx wrote:
| I do not agree on this based on what I saw generally on the
| web.
|
| The article was about *hackers* moving from a platform to OS X.
| With M1, I saw a lot of content producers, web devs, ... to go
| to the M1, but not so much hackers... especially as the
| platform is *very* restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc.
|
| A lot of my friends moved from macOS to a GNU/Linux
| distribution recently, especially as the hardware in general is
| more and more "as good" as a macbook.
|
| But, again, this is my own opinion based on what I read and saw
| - I do not have stats to show how many hackers just passed from
| macOS to anything else (or stayed on an Intel powered macbook).
| zepto wrote:
| > especially as the platform is _very_ restrictive in terms
| of APIs / apps / etc.
|
| This is utterly false.
| ficklepoet wrote:
| Nope, it's completely true. I left MacOS when they ditched
| support for 32-bit software, and was delighted to find that
| 95% of my software "just worked" on Linux. If you're
| looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in
| the foot by buying a Mac, especially today.
|
| "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated
| constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible
| system. They don't want their computer to second-guess
| them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide
| what's right for them.
| zepto wrote:
| > when they ditched support for 32-bit software
|
| This has nothing to do with the false claim about
| restrictive APIs.
|
| > If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting
| yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today.
|
| This has nothing to do with the false claim about
| restrictive APIs.
|
| > "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are
| updated constantly. They want a package manager and an
| extensible system. They don't want their computer to
| second-guess them, and they don't want a large
| corporation to decide what's right for them.
|
| This is an ideological statement that has nothing to do
| with the false claim about restrictive APIs.
|
| All of what you said may be true, but it doesn't make the
| claim about restrictive apis any less false.
| aenis wrote:
| I agree. I used to do low level windows kernel-level
| hacks such as rootkits, custom memory and network
| sniffers, and this stuff does not travel because macos is
| much better designed. But for pretty much any other type
| of hacking, the good or the nasty stuff, one can make do
| with just about any platform. People make the mistake by
| assuming that if the OS is restrictive then they cant
| hack. Literally the opposite is true. If you want to
| truly hack, get an OS that tries to resist it :-) and for
| anything more common, like network-based hacking, using
| custom peripherials and the like - macos is just fine.
| Nope. Choosing a platform for hacking is mainly a matter
| of personal preferences.
| jlokier wrote:
| Just a note that 32-bit support was also ditched in
| popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat) in
| the same year as MacOS.
| aikinai wrote:
| > especially as the platform is _very_ restrictive in terms
| of APIs / apps / etc.
|
| What's restrictive about it?
| Jetrel wrote:
| Nothing, really. There's plenty that's restrictive about
| one of several app stores on the platform (the one offered
| by apple), but - that's a store.
|
| Actually using the OS; you can do pretty much anything you
| want - up to and including installing practically
| everything ever written for linux (including entire window
| managers and the whole lot - I've seen full GNOME installs
| on top of MacOS). About the only thing you _can 't_ do is
| modify the proprietary binary blobs they give you, but
| that's just commercial software 101.
|
| This dark idea of an "authoritarian apple" is the same sort
| of "conspiracy fantasy" that people project onto the
| motives of political parties they don't like. It's the same
| sort of "leaps of logic" to assume "oh, yeah, they restrict
| app store apps from adding kernel extensions, so -- they
| must hate the idea of you having control over anything, so
| obviously you don't have root access to your own machine.".
| "Or okay, yeah, you still have that, but obviously they're
| about to rescind that, any decade now." They're not.
|
| The prediction is wrong, because it's an extrapolation from
| a bad starting point -- which is a total misread of their
| motives. The motive isn't about authoritarian control; it's
| about eliminating footguns.
|
| ---
|
| For example, it's awful nice to be able to have a power
| failure, have my machine boot back up, and see all of my
| windows from the prior session right where I left them, and
| even have all the data in them refreshed from an autosave.
| As a system API, not just a per-app thing. Or, it's nice to
| install a program, and know that doing so is totally self-
| contained; it's not barfing a bunch of (potentially
| incompatible) new library dependencies into /usr/ or
| whatever that could screw with something else I've got
| installed. That I don't have to sweat over it "altering
| something" in my system when I do the install process.
| There are a lot of things like this; things where I
| basically feel like I've got a "wingman" or someone
| watching my back, because the folks who wrote it were
| primarily concerned about designing it so I'm highly
| unlikely to screw myself (i.e. the polar opposite of `rm
| -rf`).
|
| It's just way lower stress to be able to focus on the
| actual problem I'm working on instead of also having to
| second-guess if my machine's going to betray me. That peace
| of mind isn't just a fluffy emotional thing; it also
| reduces cognitive load so I can work more effectively.
| atlgator wrote:
| Great. Now I have that song stuck in my head
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w
| user3939382 wrote:
| I wonder if the title is an homage to the Mark Morrison song
| https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w
| vincentmarle wrote:
| I was certainly hoping so but seems very doubtful
| GameOfKnowing wrote:
| Correct me if I'm misreading the article, but it's interesting
| that the differentiators Graham is citing are relatively low-
| level, (ie keenel stuff, cpu architecture, and OS hacking),
| whereas almost everyone in these comments is making statements
| about GUI elements and even display switching. Kinda goes to show
| just how abstracted away the concerns of even 16 years ago have
| become to today's ~devs~
| ianai wrote:
| Chock full of golden material and contrast/comparable points to
| today:
|
| "If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with
| computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a
| good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing. "
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| Your point being that this is completely untrue? Normal people
| have absolutely not learned how to program/automate using
| computers. All companies I've seen from the inside either use
| excel for everything or have dedicated personnel for
| automation. Excel is a good step but it still requires a lot of
| manual work.
| samcal wrote:
| I think it's true, just meant to be a little less literal.
| Things like communicating over the internet, taking notes and
| yes, automation are all useful. However, when they start, the
| UX is academic and inaccessible to a "normal person". The arg
| is that it takes ~10 years to construct the correct
| abstractions so that the normal people can do those useful
| things.
| danybittel wrote:
| It would have been better to walk around a Visual Effects
| facility.
|
| Lots of 3D. Face swapping / face filters. Photo / Video
| retouching. Background Tracking, face tracking, motion capture.
| 3D scanning (with photos).
|
| It is quite interesting that Weta / ILM were at the forefront
| of what happens in general computing.
| nvella wrote:
| Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS
| and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against
| Apple, I think I'll chime in with my two cents. I switched from
| my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched
| back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep
| things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it
| once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain.
|
| I often dock between standard-DPI displays and portable mode
| (with the high-DPI/'retina' display.) I first noticed that
| Windows doesn't correctly handle DPI switching with window
| borders, Explorer, and notifications back in 2019 (the old 2x
| scaling level remains when switching from portable to docked),
| and filed a feedback with the built-in app on Windows. I worked
| around this by killing dwm.exe and explorer.exe every time I
| docked my Surface. This issue was still present earlier this
| year, and deciding I had enough of dealing with all these little
| Windows 'quirks', wherever they arose, I switched back to my old
| Mac.
|
| It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a
| problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have
| hampered me once. The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought
| I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. Since
| switching back, I've discovered a lot of quality native apps that
| simply have no analog on Windows-OmniFocus stands out here. And
| as always, Homebrew still exists and works just as well as it
| always has for most of my *nix related tasks.
|
| Hearing about the M1 performance improvements, I can see myself
| staying on Mac for quite some time yet-I'll upgrade to an M1
| MacBook Air once this 2015 MBP (six years old!) kicks the bucket.
|
| Edit: For some context, I'm mainly a .NET developer. .NET Core/5
| is a game-changer for cross-platform and development is first
| class on really any system nowadays. I've settled on JetBrains
| Rider for my IDE and find myself generally happier than I was
| with VS on Windows.
| zepto wrote:
| I've made a serious effort to switch away - using a retina Mac
| pro with Ubuntu, and a bunch of raspberry PIs.
|
| I love Linux, and I love the PIs, but it can't see any reason
| to stick with the Ubuntu desktop. When a pro level M1 or M2
| iMac is released, I will be moving back.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > i can't see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop
|
| Then don't. Linux has hundreds of alternative desktops that
| you can install and try out in minutes. KDE, i3, Awesome,
| bspwm, Openbox and many many more are all at your fingertips.
| zepto wrote:
| I have experimented with this stuff for decades.
|
| It's all frankly half baked and clunky, and the time
| investment in configuration is insane.
|
| Yes, you can find individual features that are better than
| MacOS spread across them, but you can't get good design,
| aesthetics and features in any single one of them.
|
| You can certainly get by with it, but why would I want to
| just 'get by'?
| ficklepoet wrote:
| It's a two way street. Why would I want to "get by"
| without a package manager, or "get by" without 32-bit
| libraries, or "get by" without a functional graphics API?
| I'm the user: the choice should be mine. If Apple doesn't
| present that choice, I don't consider Apple an option.
| Simple as that. As a developer, these points are non-
| negotiable. Apple has built computers for 30 years now,
| they should be well aware of that.
| hughrr wrote:
| Oh yes so much this. 20 years here being told that today
| is the day of Linux on the desktop. Like hell.
|
| Apple stuff is _consistently good_. It 's not perfect but
| there's not really anything that kicks you in the balls
| every day to the point it makes you want to burn all your
| technology and live in the woods. About 5 minutes with
| any recently Gnome release on a Linux laptop makes me
| want to do that.
|
| Linux is always 50% done. That last 30% to get it to
| Apple's 80% done is boring so they just rewrite
| everything again or fork some new clothes for the
| emperor.
|
| The worst experience is windows. There's several layers
| and each one gets to about 33% done and is replaced with
| a new one. All the old layers sit there like rings in a
| tree, occasionally having to be gouged out to fix an
| obscure issue.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You'd probably be surprised to hear that I mostly agree
| with what you're saying. But here's the difference: MacOS
| will never feel like home to me. I've used it for months,
| and tried my hardest to make it's workflow feel natural.
| Every time I tried to rationalize a concern with the OS
| though, I'm buried by workarounds/paid apps/subscription
| services that will supposedly fix the issue for me.
| Unfortunately, that makes the last 20% of MacOS feel so
| frustrating to fill: you're always taking one step
| forwards and two steps back, fighting against a company
| that wants to take control away from you with every
| update.
|
| On Linux, I just have a script that I run that sets
| everything up the way I want it. I'll admit, it took a
| few hours to make (and has received a few updates over
| the years), but it feels much closer to that "100%" mark
| than a fully-customized Mac to me. Plus, I'd rather not
| rely on the whims of yet another "move fast and break
| things" company jockeying to take over more and more of
| my digital life. I'm good here.
| rewgs wrote:
| Yup, could not agree more.
|
| My approach with Linux has been to not even try to make
| the Linux desktop try and compete with macOS or even
| Windows. Instead, I really like the "OS as IDE" approach,
| which has caused me to settle into using most of the
| Suckless stuff -- dwm, st, dmenu. Live in your terminal
| and keep each application's function and jurisdiction as
| small as possible, and Linux is really great. For
| programming. Only.
| hughrr wrote:
| Agree also. I do a lot of Linux dev work and use
| basically vim and tmux. From macOS!
| tomxor wrote:
| > how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against
| Apple [...] To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles
| ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-
| edges still remain.
|
| This feels like a bit of a false dichotomy, WSL isn't the only
| alternative.
|
| We are so very far from limited to windows vs mac for desktop
| today, it's easier than ever to use Linux or even a BSD as a
| daily driver on a PC laptop. Even the article in 2005 noted
| hackers switching to intel boxes (not mac intel boxes) for
| FreeBSD and Linux at the time.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well, if you are self-employed maybe. Or for your own
| personal home machines, sure. But most employers with IT
| departments wouldn't be too happy if you had a "nonstandard"
| OS on your work machine because they wouldn't know how to
| secure it. Heck, many of them don't even allow Macs.
| tomxor wrote:
| I know what you mean, and that is probably still true for
| the majority, for the US at least, and in large
| corporations, but I think the world is changing.
|
| Linux is the standard OS at my work. We use it on servers,
| so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum
| dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well
| there... it's even started to be used by some of the non-
| devs to reduce windows/mac update fatigue and general
| performance issues even though they only need office
| apps... I'm at a small company but I know of other large
| companies with big IT depts applying the "locked down OS
| image" approach to Linux for desktop too.
|
| I find the concept of "windows" as the only safe OS image
| IT depts are willing to use, as fairly antiquated. Much
| like IE used to be the only browser you were allowed to use
| in many big old corps and gov agencies for "security"
| reasons.
|
| Although this is an aside, the original context of the
| article was only "hackers" machines, and whatever your
| interpretation of that is, it probably doesn't involve
| fortune 500s.
| danieldk wrote:
| _We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the
| desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and
| compatibility, since it now works well there..._
|
| I am always surprised by these things. I mean, even
| trying to use something widely-used (nowadays) as Zoom,
| basically gives me two options (on a HiDPI screen):
|
| - Use X11, but when I share a window and use drawing
| tools, whatever I draw is displaced by a seemingly
| constant offset. It's caused by scaling for HiDPI,
| because if I disable scaling, things work.
|
| - Use Wayland, but I can only share _the whole screen_.
| Drawing works, but the overlay is incredibly flaky and
| often incorrectly registers clicks.
|
| Besides that on both Wayland and X11, doing video call
| makes the fans blow at full speed and quickly drains the
| battery when a laptop is not hooked up (probably no
| hardware acceleration of video encoding/decoding). Oh,
| and I probably want to use a wired headphone, because
| using a BlueTooth headsets regularly dropout.
|
| Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so many
| paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo developer
| context.
|
| (Windows has a lot of issues as well, but at least basic
| workflows generally work.)
| tomxor wrote:
| Zoom does seem to be a piece of crap, but it lets you use
| the browser which seems to be less bad on linux. At my
| work we all use google meets and only zoom for some
| external customers, the experience seems to be much worse
| with zoom in general regardless of the OS - that said it
| seems to work ok on Linux in the browser - once you
| actually get into the meeting, that's the hardest and
| worst UX experience ever (getting into the meeting).
|
| I haven't used HiDPI monitors on linux yet, being able to
| use linux easily is more important to me for dev, it's a
| known area of weakness, and I just don't need the extra
| pixels for dev so it's easier to just avoid it. If you
| are doing graphics linux is probably not the best OS for
| the job tbh, and that's a shame but just the way it is
| currently.
|
| > Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so
| many paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo
| developer context.
|
| I suppose it depends upon how much crap software the
| workplace forces upon their workers, I understand that
| it's often mandatory to use a bunch of proprietary
| software for various types of communication and
| management stuff.. i.e stuff that's not central to actual
| dev work. If you can get away with a browser, then it's
| not bad at all... and when there is an option for a
| native version, use the browser, because usually it's
| some horrific electron thing that's even worse.
| danieldk wrote:
| _At my work we all use google meets and only zoom for
| some external customers, the experience seems to be much
| worse with zoom in general regardless of the OS_
|
| I strongly disagree. Zoom on macOS and macOS works very
| well (I currently use it for a remote course). My
| experiences have been _far far_ better than Teams, Google
| Meet, Skype, Jitsi etc. Most of which I have had to use
| for work or private. My wife is hoping that her employer
| will relent sometime and offer Zoom, because she prefers
| it so much over Google Meet, whatever Blackboard uses,
| etc.
|
| It could be that your experience is colored by the Zoom
| web interface, which I only used once on Linux and it was
| terrible then.
|
| _I haven 't used HiDPI monitors on linux yet, being able
| to use linux easily is more important to me for dev, it's
| a known area of weakness, and I just don't need the extra
| pixels for dev so it's easier to just avoid it._
|
| For me it's one of those things that can't be unseen. I
| have happily used lo-DPI screens for decades, but since I
| can't really stand lo-DPI screens anymore since I had my
| first retina MacBook. Even though I am doing development
| 80% of the time, I want my fonts to be crisp.
|
| _If you can get away with a browser, then it 's not bad
| at all... and when there is an option for a native
| version, use the browser, because usually it's some
| horrific electron thing that's even worse._
|
| I guess that's true on Linux. Unfortunately, very few web
| apps beat native applications like OmniGraffle, the
| Affinity Suite, or even PowerPoint.
| tomxor wrote:
| ok, but all of your use cases and priorities are so far
| away from the original premise of the article that's it's
| clear your needs are more inline with a regular mac or
| windows user than a "hacker" or dev... (just saying) it's
| not for everyone.
|
| Also which video conferencing app "is the worst" seems to
| be pretty subjective, but tbh they are all pretty crappy
| and replaceable, i'm not really sure what this has to do
| with OS choice.
| swiley wrote:
| When Lion came out I switched to Debian after it corrupted
| the rootfs twice. Installation my MBP was pretty easy.
| tomxor wrote:
| Same here, 10.6 was my last MacOS, it felt like it lost
| direction and focus after that.
|
| For a 2009 MBP it was a nice experience trying out FreeBSD
| and various linux distros before settling on Debian. The
| only stumbling block on that machine was the macEFI, which
| there were eventually plenty of solutions for - I hear the
| later machines are a bit of a nightmare to run anything
| other than MacOS though.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of
| a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features
| have hampered me once.
|
| _They can also both be turned off!_ Gatekeeper in 30 seconds
| and SIP in less than five minutes. I legitimately understand
| why people get worked up about optional features.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Any problem I've had in Linux was fixed in 5 minutes too.
|
| There are too many things in macOS which can't be fixed. You
| can't even change the color of your mouse pointer if you want
| to.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...actually, if SIP is off, you _can_ , they're just PDF
| files! But yes it's certainly not a real feature!
| /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Ve
| rsions/A/Frameworks/HIServices.framework/Versions/A/Resourc
| es
| Causality1 wrote:
| Windows has a particular knack for giving the user the
| impression it doesn't care about them at all. The things that
| irritate me now are the same things that irritated me last
| year, five years ago, and in a few cases twenty years ago. They
| make you go "Jesus is everybody asleep over there?"
|
| For example, if you want a notification icon to always be
| shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to
| find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit
| "show icon and notifications". Why can't you just right click
| an icon and hit "show icon and notifications"? Because Windows
| doesn't give a shit about you.
| [deleted]
| MarkSweep wrote:
| All the ads, the file search that searches Bing and can't be
| disabled, the telemetry that sends the websites you browse to
| Microsoft. There must be some product manager over there
| whose bonus is based on how much ad revenue they can get out
| of Windows, no matter the cost. Installing the Windows 11
| preview is just depressing, like you say it really makes me
| feel like they don't care and expect people just to take it.
|
| For your specific notification icon issue, I thought you can
| just drag the icon from the pop up tray to the main system
| tray to keep it always visible?
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| The insanely deep nesting of little configuration windows is
| probably the number one thing that makes Windows feel old to
| me. The new settings app is an improvement, but sadly one
| that lives in isolation.
| herbst wrote:
| Or the point that many of these configurations can ONLY be
| accessed by GUI. That's one thing that makes windows (and
| even MacOS to some degree) so awkward to use sometimes.
| aikinai wrote:
| Almost every setting in MacOS can be accessed by the
| command line, and many things only there. Actually I
| don't think I've found anything so far that can't be set
| from the command line and I do a fair amount of that kind
| of tweaking.
| herbst wrote:
| Xcode license agreements? Took me literally more than a
| hour the first time I installed something on the terminal
| but refused to finish because I never heard of xcode or
| that you need to open it manually in order to confirm a
| license agreement. When I was just installing the ruby
| stack and it needed some compilers via xcode I guess?
|
| That was on a MBP like 2015 or so. The error message was
| not helpful at all, I had to ask someone with experience
| or I would still be installing ruby to this day.
|
| (Given I don't remember anything else)
| aikinai wrote:
| sudo xcodebuild -license accept
|
| Google actually autocompleted "in the terminal" when I
| started typing out the question and this was answered by
| the first link.
|
| I have tons of development environment software installed
| and I've never opened the Xcode GUI.
| herbst wrote:
| This was not the case in 2015/14. These stack overflow
| answers easily confirm that you needed to open it at
| least once, and that there have been related bugs in that
| time:
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/175069/how-to-
| acce...
|
| Good they fixed it. Still made a bad impression on me
| back then coming from using Linux for over a decade.
| leoc wrote:
| And often that's because MS decided not to replicate some
| capabilities of the old WinNT-vintage configuration GUI in
| the pretty new touch-friendly interface. Probably the
| classic example is the trek you have to make, through two
| or three dialogs of nice-looking but most often useless new
| GUI, to a cryptic "Change adapter options" button and on to
| where Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network
| Connections survives, still the vital dialog and still
| largely in its original late-'90s form. Oh, and then
| there's the decision that having separate default devices
| and default communication devices for audio is too nerdy,
| so hip young Windows 7 kids don't need to see anything
| about any default communication device in the shiny new
| sound GUI. Hilarity then ensues when the VR headset somehow
| automatically becomes the default-comms-device microphone
| and you mysteriously become barely audible on voice calls.
| Of course other big, important sections of the GUI (file
| permissions?!) seem to have been junked completely without
| any replacement.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those settings windows are part of the API and windows
| has to provide them for legacy software in many cases.
|
| What was absolutely insane was not replicating the
| functionality into the new control panel setup leading to
| _power users_ feeling dumb because they can't find
| network settings under network settings.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Window 11 goes a long way towards fixing this. There's still
| multiple ways to change things, but all of the touch screen
| settings are gone and the new settings app is laid out
| logically.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| > For example, if you want a notification icon to always be
| shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to
| find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit
| "show icon and notifications".
|
| Or, you know, just drag and drop it into the always shown
| area.
| orf wrote:
| > It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of
| a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features
| have hampered me once
|
| Woah, even after the "it's literally 1984" hacker-news
| groupthink? You're telling me they might have massively
| inflated perceived issues without even trying them? No way.
| Never.
| mciancia wrote:
| It's funny that it has been around 9 years now since Apple
| introduced retina macbooks and their implementation of HiDPI is
| good from the start but, while it's getting better, windows and
| linux still need to catch up.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| HiDPI has been a nightmare on Windows. I have wasted so much
| time making it work on a Windows Forms application.
| FreakyT wrote:
| I feel like Apple's approach to hardware made their job much
| easier -- they just ensured that every retina Mac had a
| display with exactly 2x the pixels as its pre-retina
| equivalent, so they never had to deal with fractional scaling
| like Windows often does.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Yet that too works very well.
| bombcar wrote:
| They deal with lots of fractional scaling - at first they
| may have done simple pixel doubling but now the screens are
| often at non integer ratios.
|
| In fact you can speed it up slightly by making sure the
| display resolution is exactly "half" the actual resolution
| so to prevent MacOS from scaling 8x internally first.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The only scales supported by Apple software are integer
| scales (1x, 2x, 3x). The iPhone 6 Plus had a 2.6x screen
| -- iOS would render at 3x and then scale the image down
| to fit.
| https://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/iphone-6-screens-
| demystifi...
| bombcar wrote:
| See https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/15-inch-macbook-pro-
| screen-re... - it renders at 8x or something and scales
| down inexactly.
| tootie wrote:
| Funny enough I did a bunch of projects that required pushing
| like 16K output (video wall, not a personal setup) and at
| that point Windows becomes the only option because it
| requires high end GPU and an array of outputs.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| They've had wonderful trackpads for even longer and PC laptop
| OEMs still have yet to catch up. No, I'm entirely
| uninterested in the touchscreen gimmick of the week.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's because Apple was very forward-looking in 1999 and
| decided to use floating point coordinates for the
| CoreGraphics API. Nothing on the Mac draws using exact
| integer pixels (since the death of the transitional Carbon
| API anyway). Scaling was built in from scratch.
| dTal wrote:
| What exactly is wrong with "scaling" on Linux? I use Qt
| apps on Plasma and everything just works. Nearly all my
| displays are HiDPI now.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > Nearly all my displays are HiDPI now.
|
| Well, that's the whole thing. HiDPI in and of itself
| works well. I use it with a 24" UHD monitor and I
| absolutely love the setup.
|
| But the main issue with Linux, at least with X11, is that
| it doesn't handle multiple displays with different DPI
| settings.
|
| As you noted, QT seems to work fine, as do some other
| toolkits that have dynamic scaling according to the
| monitor size. Alacritty does this too, for example (don't
| know what toolkit they use, though).
|
| But GTK in particular is terrible. Yes, you can configure
| it to use scaling, in which case it works well, IF you
| don't need fractional scaling (though recent versions of
| Gnome seem to support it somehow).
|
| But now, if you're going to use, say, a HiDPI laptop with
| a "regular", larger external monitor, you're gonna have a
| bad time. If you enable scaling, the widgets will be huge
| on the LoDPI display. If you disable it, widgets will be
| teeny tiny on the HiDPI one.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Note that the problem isn't really with X11 (or at least
| Xorg) since it does provide the necessary information via
| RandR to perform per-monitor scaling.
|
| The issue is really with window managers and toolkits.
| What needs to happen is that window managers ask the
| applications (the top level windows really) to scale
| themselves -this can be done not just for DPI purposes-
| and then the applications should apply that scaling.
|
| (applications should expose that they can support this -
| like they expose that they support handling a 'close
| window' event - so that compositing window managers can
| do it themselves for applications that do not support it,
| which is also why this needs to go through the window
| manager)
|
| Qt _can_ do this but AFAIK window managers do not do this
| because there isn 't any standard events for that - i
| remember an email about this exact topic when i took a
| look at the Xorg mailing list for WMs some time ago, but
| it didn't seem to be going anywhere (in that it barely
| had any replies).
|
| So it really is about standardizing how it is to be done.
| I think the main reason it isn't done is that such setups
| are comparably rare (i mean hidpi displays themselves are
| very rare - if you check any desktop resolution stats
| they often barely are a blip - and having both a hidpi
| display and a regular dpi one is even less common than
| that) so developers aren't that interested in
| implementing such a thing.
|
| One way it could be done however is also pushing the idea
| that this isn't just for multimonitor setups: as i wrote
| above, you can use that for generic scaling, which is
| useful even for single monitor regular dpi setups (if
| anything it can be very useful for low resolution setups
| - like 1366x768 and similar which are _way_ more common
| than hidpi - when faced with applications with a lot of
| padding, etc).
| catblast01 wrote:
| > i mean hidpi displays themselves are very rare - if you
| check any desktop resolution stats they often barely are
| a blip
|
| Do you have a link/cite for this? I couldn't find easily
| somewhere summarizing pixel density stats.
|
| "Desktop resolution stats" is not the same thing. All the
| retina displays have at least a 2x pixel ratio so these
| tables on a cursory Google search are clearly lumping 13
| inch MacBook pros into the 1280x800 bucket for instance.
|
| You got a reference to something that clearly is
| accounting for pixel ratio?
| vetinari wrote:
| > Note that the problem isn't really with X11 (or at
| least Xorg) since it does provide the necessary
| information via RandR to perform per-monitor scaling.
|
| It is issue with X11. If you have Wordperfect binary from
| 1999, it still has to work; it does not matter that RandR
| provides information, old clients will not ask for it and
| without it, they will be broken.
|
| That's why Xwayland does upscaling by itself.
|
| > mean hidpi displays themselves are very rare - if you
| check any desktop resolution stats they often barely are
| a blip - and having both a hidpi display and a regular
| dpi one is even less common than that
|
| Cause and effect. They are rare, because using them
| sucks, making them even rarer. On systems, where they do
| not suck, they are not that rare. This attitude makes
| entire platform worse off.
| grishka wrote:
| The issue with Linux is that nothing is part of the
| system. There's no single standard GUI toolkit. There's
| no single standard windowing system. There's way too many
| variations of everything.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| This isn't really an issue, you just need people to agree
| around doing some common stuff (even if they do their own
| stuff elsewhere).
|
| And this is really not that dissimilar under Windows:
| nowadays you have a lot of different GUI toolkits and
| applications still need to "opt-in" and explicitly
| support stuff like scaling, so you have a lot of
| applications that do not do that.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They don't even agree with what they are supposed to
| support from freedesktops.org.
|
| On Windows, Win32 doesn't do that by default because it
| would break backwards compatibility from those Windows 95
| binaries being run on a Windows 10 2021 edition, so it
| must be a conscious decision to enable it.
|
| UWP and WinUI work just fine.
| vetinari wrote:
| For decades, the standard windowing system was X11; and
| not just for Linux, for other systems as well.
|
| The issue was elsewhere - it provided standardized wire
| protocol and you could not break it. It could extend it,
| but applications not aware of the extension would be not
| able to benefit. Windows and Mac on the other hand kept
| the protocol proprietary and you had to use supplied
| libraries, you could not talk to the display server
| directly. So Microsoft and Apple could update these
| libraries; on Linux, there was no such option, all the
| apps using wire protocol instead of client libraries
| would be left out in the dark.
| herbst wrote:
| Some of us don't call that an issue ;) it just makes
| discussions about what's possible more complicated
| danieldk wrote:
| _What exactly is wrong with "scaling" on Linux? I use Qt
| apps on Plasma and everything just works. Nearly all my
| displays are HiDPI now._
|
| If you use 2x scaling (or other integer scaling),
| everything is fine. If you need fractional scaling,
| things break down pretty quickly, at least on GNOME.
|
| Once you use fractional scaling (e.g. 1.5), GTK
| applications will scale correctly, but are slightly
| slower and consume more mattery. However, all XWayland
| applications are unusably blurry.
|
| Unfortunately, fractional scaling is really needed on 14"
| 1080p laptops or 4k e.g. 27" screens. With 1x scaling
| everything is tiny and with 2x scaling gigantic.
|
| The only workaround that worked ok for me was using 1x
| scaling and using font scaling in GNOME. Many controls
| and icons are tiny that way, but at least text is
| readable and not blurry. Of course, this only works up to
| some extend and when both screens need the same amount of
| scaling (since font scaling cannot be configured per
| screen).
|
| [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/566
| hollerith wrote:
| On a _non-HiDPI_ display (I use one that is 1680 by 1050
| and one that is 1280 by 1024) fractional scaling works
| fine on my machine running Gnome 34 with apps that bypass
| XWayland and talk directly with Wayland (which is true of
| all the apps I use). (Google Chrome needs to be started
| with a couple of command-line switches to bypass
| XWayland.)
|
| But your comment makes me hesitate to buy a HiDPI
| monitor!
| dTal wrote:
| I guess this is the issue with saying "Linux" supports or
| doesn't support things. My software stack of
| Xorg/Qt/Plasma works fine. Your stack of
| Wayland/GTK/GNOME doesn't. Should we hold it against
| "Linux"? Is that a fair comparison to MacOS, where
| everything uses Cocoa? For that matter, how do GTK apps
| look on MacOS?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The scaling was quite glitchy in 2009 [0], and in 2021, the
| only allowed scale factors are 100% and 200% -- so you
| don't need floating-point numbers for it.
|
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-
| os-x-10-6/21/#re...
| zacwest wrote:
| If you want to position an @2x view (1 pt = 2 px) you
| need to use fractional points. A view at (0, 0.5) in
| points is (0, 1) in pixels. Resolution Independence was a
| separate concept.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| When your graphics model is Display PostScript (and then
| PDF)....
| [deleted]
| Chazprime wrote:
| > The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get
| used to them, have actually grown on me.
|
| That's the thing with some people and Apple; I generally moan
| whenever Apple changes their UI substantially (the change to
| the "flat" iOS comes to mind first), but soon I come to wonder
| how I ever liked anything else. :)
| bombcar wrote:
| They also (intentionally or not) make many of the changes
| "reversible" with tweaks and other programs. This allows the
| people who have a visceral reaction to revert and usually
| over time it softens, and then you find yourself not
| bothering with it.
|
| The biggest change for me was the switch to zsh which ended
| up in me changing my default shell everywhere else.
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is why Linux exists. I was pretty disappointed by the
| compatibility/performance of the M1, so I switched back to my
| desktop with Manjaro Linux installed on it. Suffice to say, I
| doubt I'll be using my Macbook unless Apple revives 32-bit
| libraries or switches back to x86 in some capacity.
| minimaul wrote:
| Rider and .NET Core aren't native yet on M1 - but .NET 6 fixes
| this :)
| seltzered_ wrote:
| "switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of
| 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few
| months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles
| ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-
| edges still remain."
|
| I had a similar feeling when given a new windows laptop in 2020
| to work with that was supposedly better spec'ed than my late
| 2013 macbook 15". The problem has been windows and the lack of
| finding flow in it's OS. I've been trying to document workflows
| & apps here for the past year to see if alternatives are
| emerging:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...
| . For me it's not so much the development environment but
| whether I can quickly deal with administrivia tasks (organizing
| files, copying things from one form to another, etc.). I'm
| surprised windows 11 still lacks miller columns:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
|
| My concern about the apple platform going forward isn't so much
| about the technical, but the material - my 2013-era macbook
| died recently and found the fact that I could remove the ssd
| and plug it into a similarly old mac to still be a savior ,
| despite having multiple backups. It's driven me to consider
| installing linux on an intel windows tablet over buying an M1
| macbook - I'm getting leary of both the lack of repairability
| and really wanting a tablet on stand + detached
| keyboard/trackpad for sake of ergonomics.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I'm glad that your MacBook Pro didn't get bricked by the Big
| Sur update! I heard that there was some issue with the HDMI
| port firmware, so haven't updated my 2014 MBP.
|
| I have had major issues with trying to replace the battery.
| Beware of third-party replacements, which idle at 12V. The
| original battery idles at 2.2V and "wakes up". A voltage spike
| when waking from battery killed my logic board, and 3
| professionals have failed to repair it so far. I've spent over
| NZ$1900 on 5 replacement batteries to try to get something that
| works, since September 2020. I just want a laptop that I can
| use on the bus, with a removable SSD so I won't lose my data
| when it breaks, and iTunes so I can sync my iPod and iPhone.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The music app in Big Sur still supports syncing to old iPods,
| I used it with an old 30-pin pre-video iPod nano that I found
| in a thrift store. It could even properly reformat it from
| windows FAT32 to Mac HFS format
| Joeri wrote:
| Instead of looking for a removable SSD consider setting up
| some kind of syncing and backup solution. A removable ssd
| doesn't protect you from theft or ransomware. I use a
| combination of time machine, backblaze and syncthing to make
| sure all my data is synced across my machines and backed up
| locally and in the cloud.
| smoldesu wrote:
| A removable SSD _does_ ensure that my laptop doesn 't
| become trash after I use it long enough. For many people
| (myself included) no computer can truly feel "perfect"
| unless it can be run in relative perpetuity.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I also use Time Machine to an external drive.
|
| 4TB Sabrent Rocket M.2 SSDs with adaptors don't come cheap.
| Getting that much storage soldered onto the logic board is
| even more expensive.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Switching to windows and expecting an improvement from MacOS is
| silly. I switched to Linux from MacOs in 2015 and never looked
| back. I cam dual boot into Windows, but do so less than once a
| year these days.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Anecdata:
|
| One of our developers had used mac since the pre-Intel days. He
| used to develop mostly mac native apps. In recent years it has
| been mostly web dev in linux.
|
| He ran Linux through vagrant on mac. Now he does the same on pc.
| He says that the hardest thing about moving is that he lost his
| browser shortcuts.
|
| Ps he has a company provided PC, Intel and M1 macs on his home
| desk so really he can use whatever he wants.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Firefox sync?
| larusso wrote:
| Yes I remember the shift around that time. I had my first contact
| with a Mac at school in ca 2001. OSX was just released and the
| school received a new order of iMac G3's as lab computers. What
| can I say. I hated the machines. Everything was so weird and
| ugly. It didn't help that the teachers had to run OS9 for
| compatibility reasons with the school software. I had a brand new
| WinXP desktop machine at home which was miles and leaps ahead of
| the iMacs ;) well for me anyways. The only thing I really liked
| was iTunes. That is a story on it own ;). It took a few more
| years for me to come around. It was with the release of snow
| leopard that I saw that macOS was way better than windows. I
| switched in 2011 professionally to mac and use it still as my
| daily driver. But my love for the system that sparked with snow
| leopard dwindled. I didn't want to update to Catalina (was forced
| in the end due to a new machine I got and well Xcode) and still
| refuse the UI of BigSur. I switched to Arch Linux on my personal
| machine but have to stay on macOS professionally as the only
| other option my company IT can support is Windows. Well macOS is
| no longer the highland for developers, WSL and Apple itself saw
| to that. But Windows is still a no go area as a daily driver for
| me.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Apple pumping iBooks into schools was a big coup for them in
| the early 2000s. A lot of people my age got into Macs and never
| got out of them, just because of that early exposure.
|
| https://bangordailynews.com/2002/06/11/news/during-visit-to-...
| larusso wrote:
| I'm from germany. Here Apple was never a huge player. I
| learned very late of its existence. My school was a so called
| OSZ (Oberstufen Zentrum) which is something like school a
| where you can gain work related diplomas. I'm really bad at
| describing this. They had a design and print department and
| they run all on apple.
| the-dude wrote:
| I think the English term is _vocational_.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| Yep. For me, I always "dealt" with Windows at school.
| Computers were just a device you were meant to wrestle with
| to get a job done and that was just an immutable truth.
|
| Then I moved to a new middle school that would bring in carts
| of iBooks for us to do work on. Some things were weird (lack
| of a right click for one), but other things just felt
| incredibly natural and the design didn't scream "soulless
| device for office drones."
|
| When my parents got me my first computer the next year, it
| was a Mac, and I've stuck with Apple for 17 years since then.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind
| of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo
| system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes,
| the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of
| people are going to want these.
|
| This aged well :-)
| zabzonk wrote:
| Actually, I am writing this on an Asus laptop with so-called
| "Bang & Olufsen Technology". The laptop is fine, though showing
| its age, but the sound quality through the built-in speakers is
| awful, and always has been - I now use a cheap Anker bluetooth
| speaker which is far better.
|
| And to be honest, I was never very impressed with the sound
| quality of B&O way back in the 1970s, when they were seen to be
| the height of sophistication.
| ch_sm wrote:
| You should definitely try the newer Bang and Olufsens, if
| you're into high-end audio - like the Beolab 20 or Beolab 28.
| They're incredible, and actually compare favorably to B&W or
| KEF in the same price range. The laptop licensing shenanigans
| are awful though.
| leoc wrote:
| I get the impression that Apple since Jobs' return has
| actively gone out of its way to try not to have pundits and
| the general public make the pretty obvious comparisons to B &
| O or Bose, because they rightly see it as not a flattering
| comparison for Apple.
| skavi wrote:
| Bose' QC series of headphones is great. Incredibly
| comfortable and well tuned with noise canceling that's
| still very competitive with more recent headphones.
|
| The newer Bose 700 makes too many compromises to look nice
| IMO.
| analog31 wrote:
| Oddly enough it was around 2005 that I was using one platform at
| my workplace (Windows) and another at home (Linux). And I've used
| Apple II, MS-DOS, 68k Mac, etc. I decided two things:
|
| 1. Any time spent learning the "innards" of an OS, would be spent
| on Linux. Most of that learning has resulted from tinkering with
| the Raspberry Pi.
|
| 2. All of the software that I use on a daily basis would be
| platform independent, especially my programming tools.
|
| As a result, right now I have the luxury of being ambivalent
| about platforms. I actually spend remarkably little time
| interacting with the platform, mainly setting up networking when
| I get a new machine. I can choose a new computer based on
| ergonomics and cost. Windows happens to have the best touch
| screen support right now, and refurb'd computers are not
| intolerably expensive.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought
| Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software
| (or non-hacker software, come to that)? It seems to me that
| Windows and Linux both had much greater funds of developer
| software than did the Mac ecosystem.
| criddell wrote:
| There seems to be a lot more interesting software on the Mac
| than Windows or Linux and I've never really understood that.
|
| Think about how many Mac enthusiast podcasts, websites, and
| blogs there are. Windows should have many more of these, but
| they don't. And Linux enthusiast sites are very technical and
| low level. There's no writing about being a Linux user that
| isn't also about being a developer.
|
| Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code,
| and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In
| theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the
| reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing
| to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not
| on that platform by choice?
|
| Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they
| too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.
| handrous wrote:
| > Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured
| Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows?
| In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the
| reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users
| willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows
| users are not on that platform by choice?
|
| There are such companies! For video games. Video games and
| B2B/business-productivity software is where the money is on
| Windows. Your buyers are PC gamers or businesses.
|
| There are also lots of unsophisticated low-needs users who
| are on Windows at home because it's what was cheap at the big
| box store, and/or they learned in the earlier PC days to shop
| based on spec numbers back when those mattered much for basic
| home users, and the Apple section of the store doesn't look
| very interesting if you shop that way.
|
| AFAI can tell (from watching relatives fitting this profile,
| which is... all of my relatives, plus many relatives of
| friends) the only way to make money off them, since the death
| of actual boxed software in stores (which they did used to
| sometimes buy!), is to be Microsoft and use Win10 to spam
| them until they buy (maybe not even realizing what's
| happening or, once they've paid, what they bought or what
| it's for or how to ever use it--yes, really) or be a
| straight-up malware scammer type. The problem with those
| users, if you want to sell them software, is they basically
| just want/need a browser, MS Office, and perhaps something to
| play the unorganized folder of pirated MP3s of 50s-90s music
| the unsophisticated-user side of the family has been passing
| around for 20 years. They may want something to organize
| photos and such, but they'll never figure out how to use it
| right even if you show them how, unless it's high-lock-in,
| very automatic ("AI" tagging and such), and probably cloud-
| based (so, likely some Web crap, not desktop software, oh and
| because advertising and hoovering up user data to train AI is
| an endless money spigot _if and only if you already have
| massive scale_ you 'll likely be competing on price with
| "free", so, have fun with that).
|
| > Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet
| they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.
|
| Developing for Linux means receiving support load for all its
| desktop brokenness (driver problems [mostly video drivers];
| issues with any basic hardware+software systems your software
| relies on to work well for all but the most basic operation,
| like audio for example; xorg/wayland/DE instability) and
| every crazy configuration out there.
|
| Sure you can say "fuck off, we support exactly and only [a
| couple major desktop distros] with the default config that
| you get if you keep clicking OK on the OS installer and then
| not changing anything, and only on [list of hardware], report
| on any other set-up and you will be ignored" but you're
| already on such a tiny platform that you can hardly afford to
| annoy/turn-off/generate-vocal-anti-fans-among users. So
| instead... you develop for literally anything else, or maybe
| toss out some electron garbage to Linux as an afterthought.
|
| Linux is expensive per-user and doesn't bring you that many
| users to begin with. Plus, yeah, there may be less
| willingness to pay for software.
| criddell wrote:
| I'm glad you pointed out video games because that's a great
| counterpoint.
|
| It just seems strange that with a billion desktops, there
| aren't a few million who would buy software like OmniFocus
| or Things if it existed on Windows.
|
| And yeah, desktop Linux is messy.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The mac's main advantage to devs/hackers is Darwin, and we
| mostly use it for linux compatible software. Heck, I've
| switched from FreeBSD to osx just to get better laptop hardware
| and peripheral support.
|
| Most stuff we produce are *nix compatible. I'm no great hacker
| but everything I wrote to make my life easier is shell based.
|
| I think Windows with ASL will have the same impact, with more
| and more *nix compatible software being produced.
| m12k wrote:
| As someone that uses both Mac and Windows regularly, I find the
| quality of the software I use on Mac to be generally higher.
| Cyberduck (FTP), Transmission (bittorrent), Charles Proxy
| (packet sniffing), Sourcetree (git gui), Pixelmator (image
| editing), Sketch (vector graphics), Things (todo), 1Password
| (password management) are all solid applications with polished
| user interfaces, where I struggle to find anything quite as
| nice on Windows (several of these have been or are being ported
| to Windows, with varying levels of polish carrying over).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This is a problem on Linux too. The lack of a Sketch
| equivalent for Linux bit me just the other day. Akira is the
| closest thing, but it's so early in its dev cycle that it
| won't be useable for several more years. A lot of people will
| point to Inkscape, but it's much more of an _Illustrator_
| alternative and as such feels more geared for print.
|
| I might've been able to fudge Figma to do what I needed, but
| even that wouldn't have been ideal, with how it's designed
| for collaborative prototyping more than a generic digital
| vector graphics editor. Aside from that, I don't like using
| Figma simply because they don't publish specs for their file
| format and try to lock you in (as opposed to Sketch, which
| uses a publicly documented file format that has plenty of
| converters).
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| CyberDuck (macOS) is inferior to Ipswitch WS_FTP (Windows).
| The CyberDuck interface is awkward, it's confusing to tell
| where your uploads and downloads will wind up.
|
| Cornerstone (macOS Subversion client) is atrocious, God help
| you if you created a sandbox in the wrong place, deleting it
| could wipe out your repository. Tortoise (Windows) is so much
| better.
|
| As a Windows developer recently porting my code to macOS, I
| am underwhelmed. I expected to be blown away.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Cyberduck is an odd choice for a file transmission app
| showcase, Panic's Transmit (https://panic.com/transmit/) is
| much better.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| These are all apps that did not exist in 2005. In 2005, XP
| was king.
| m12k wrote:
| Right, that was my point. The comment I was replying to
| said that all those hackers that supposedly switched to Mac
| in 2005 didn't seem to have produced any notable software,
| so I listed a whole bunch of nice software that they had
| produced.
| aidos wrote:
| Nitpick: I might be misremembering but I feel like I had
| CyberDuck in 2004 (OSX Panther?)
| mkl95 wrote:
| What are your issues with Transmission on Windows? I have
| been using it for years and it works like a charm.
| zabzonk wrote:
| As you say, several of these are also available on Windows -
| I can't think why anyone developing such software would not
| make them available on multiple platforms.
| herbst wrote:
| Sometimes because APIs? Back when I had a Mac forced on me
| I was surprised how fast you can discover files and
| software, something windows back then simply has not
| managed to offer via their API. The 'finder' or whatever
| that tool was called simply felt wrong on windows, nothing
| like the original.
|
| One different example may is the gnome shell desktop. Many
| of us who use it have basically overcome the win95 approach
| of desktop design. There is as far as I know no equivalent
| on windows or Mac. And a port would not be possible as you
| can't replace their window managers.
|
| Then there is the whole Linux standard toolset, that yes
| works on windows these days, but obviously feels very
| foreign and doesn't integrate well to the system.
|
| It's not only a matter of porting software when some things
| are so fundamentally different
| zepto wrote:
| > I can't think why anyone developing such software would
| not make them available on multiple platforms.
|
| Because it's a lot more work, and because it's next to
| impossible to create a great cross platform app with a
| native feeling UI.
| ficklepoet wrote:
| > it's next to impossible to create a great cross
| platform app with a native feeling UI
|
| And who do we have to thank for that? Perhaps there's
| some business out there that made a chocolate-themed UI
| toolkit that was notoriously proprietary and unworkable,
| so much so that it drove the industry into a software
| drought that only let up when x86 was fully standardized?
|
| Maybe I'm just spitballing here.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I believe that objective-c and the Apple documentation didn't
| encourage people to create on Mac for a long time.
|
| Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using
| Electron.
| pjmlp wrote:
| On the contrary, OS X had first support to Java via the Java
| Bridge and Apple's own JVM implementation, because they
| weren't sure if the developer community educated in Object
| Pascal and C++ would be willing to touch Objective-C, so they
| decided to play safe with having Java for the ride, doubling
| down on Java uptake.
|
| Objective-C was embraced by the developer community in such a
| way that they quickly deprecated Java Bridge and eventually
| got rid of Java development costs altogether.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I remember running Java applications on a powerpc g4. It
| was incredibly slow and ugly, no wonder why developers
| still preferred objective-c over Java on Mac.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That was certainly not Apple's Java, as it had good JIT
| compiler with code cache, and the same L&F than
| Objective-C applications, that wasn't definitely it.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I remember the Java IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans being
| incredibly slow, and ugly, compared to the same software
| on similar priced computers running windows or GNU/Linux,
| or compared to more native software like Xcode or
| TextMate. But perhaps the powerpc g4 was simply a bad CPU
| for a JVM and Java developers were not very good at
| designing UIs for Mac.
|
| I also remember having to wait a long time whenever the
| JVM was starting. It was annoying when a website did
| contain a Java applet because my web browser would be
| stuck until the JVM was ready.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, because they did not made use of the APIs exposed
| by Apple on their JVM implementation,
|
| XCode also did Java back then.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation
| /Co...
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation
| /Co...
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation
| /Ja...
| WanderPanda wrote:
| What the M1 giveth, Electron taketh away
| tomxor wrote:
| vi inspired the concept of the GUI.
|
| Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost
| CPU cycles.
|
| -- A JavaScript Dev
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just the plain idea that vi had anything to do with GUI
| is hilarious.
| tomxor wrote:
| It is. It's modality was an anti-inspiration, as in...
| how the hell can we not have modes (a GUI)... sort of...
| then everyone started burring crap under menus though
| feature accretion... hence we go full circle, because
| people get fed up of bloat, leading to both UX fatigue
| and performance fatigue, which eventually gives you a
| kind of appreciation for simple modal interfaces.
| pjmlp wrote:
| These are GUIs,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843
|
| vi might have visual on the name, but only for those in
| the Bell Labs silo
| dijit wrote:
| A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux.
|
| Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible; it's
| not easy to draw a direct line between that and the Mac, but
| I'm relatively certain there is correlation.
|
| I'm talking about castnow, youtube-dl and a whole slew of other
| software which integrates proprietary things. In the 00s things
| like those were almost all running exclusive to windows.
| csomar wrote:
| > Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible
|
| Yet, still waiting for a Git GUI for Linux.
| ficklepoet wrote:
| Pretty much everyone I know has used GitG since... 2006?
| ptomato wrote:
| Sublime Merge?
| zabzonk wrote:
| > A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux
|
| I'd say it was the other way around, and it also bleeds into
| Windows. For example (of course): git.
| herbst wrote:
| Or literally the whole Linux ecosystem with WSL
| deregulateMed wrote:
| People really don't want to believe that we are chemical
| reactions and that Apple used psychology tricks on us through
| marketing campaigns.
|
| It's a lot easier to justify buying an Apple product with an
| excuse than to realize that relentless advertising is what
| caused people to give Apple money.
| onethought wrote:
| I don't buy this. There was something special in that time of
| having a Unix system with a well considered cohesive UI.
| Windows was not an option, and 1 click install set-and-forget
| linux distros weren't (aren't? :P ) really common.
|
| There was a clear gap in the market for a unix system that
| was up and running with minimal fuss, apple capitalised
| (accidentally happened upon) this.
| [deleted]
| shkkmo wrote:
| Dell makes hardware that easily rivals Apple and sells it
| with Linux pre-installed and officially covered by their
| support services.
| mthoms wrote:
| The parent was referring to 2005 (when PG posted this).
| Did Dell have that option way back then? Colour me
| impressed if so.
| slacktide wrote:
| Pretty close. They started offering Ubuntu preinstalls on
| 24 May 2007.
|
| https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/blog/15994-2/
| fundad wrote:
| Exactly! Psychology tricks would include supporting Linux
| commercially which is a wildly successful business (even
| before counting the likes of AWS which supports an OS as
| part of hosting).
|
| They by definition market their product and win sales.
| Sales funded Linux and a lot of OSS beyond what hobbyists
| could possibly have done, an inconvenient truth.
|
| People who want to support their own installation of Linux
| or FreeBSD do so without considering a commercial OS and a
| few of them constantly shitpost about how anyone could
| possibly not make the same choice as they do.
| ficklepoet wrote:
| > do so without considering a commercial OS
|
| You forget that most people are using Linux to _replace_
| a commercial OS.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| The same people that want a Unix based operating system
| can't manage to install Linux?
|
| I was 14 years old in 2005 and knew nothing about
| programming, but was able to get Linux installed in a few
| minutes.
|
| There is a real reason, but the part of the brain that
| makes the decision is different than the speech part of the
| brain.
| spiderice wrote:
| I have also installed and managed many Linux systems.
| Doesn't mean I want to on my main driver. I also don't
| want a cheap plastic computer with a terrible trackpad
| (regardless of how great the intervals are) and until
| recently, that was pretty much all you could find in the
| non-Mac laptop world.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| "cheap plastic"
|
| The marketing company won.
|
| This is a Major red flag.
|
| Speaking of cheap plastic. "Cheap keyboard" ring a bell?
| pram wrote:
| Nah dude, I installed Slackware 7 in 1999 when I was 13,
| and used Linux up until 2003. Then I bought a G4
| PowerBook and never looked back. People who chose OSX for
| its UNIX foundation weren't too dumb and stupid to use
| Linux, contrary to what you believe.
| linguae wrote:
| Sometimes users have problems installing Linux, not
| because of lack of ability, but because of lack of driver
| support. This is especially true for laptops. I remember
| installing Linux on my desktop in 2004 as an 11th grader,
| and I remember having to purchase a $50 serial port modem
| at Fry's (yes, my parents were still on dial-up at the
| time) because the modem that shipped with my PC was a
| "Winmodem," one that had many of its core functionality
| implemented in software that was only available for
| Windows.
|
| After my freshman year of college ended, in the summer of
| 2006 I replaced my desktop (which was dual-booting
| Windows XP and FreeBSD) with a Core Duo MacBook, which
| was just released two months before. It felt great using
| a Unix machine where I didn't have to worry about driver
| support, and where I can run Unix applications and
| various proprietary software packages such as Microsoft
| Office without dual-booting, emulation, or
| virtualization.
|
| I've stayed a Mac user since, though lately I'm in the
| slow transition of switching away; I just replaced my
| 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running
| Windows 10 (I love WSL!), and I plan to replace my 2013
| Mac Pro with a Ryzen 7 or 9 build sometime in 2022 or
| 2023, which will most likely run FreeBSD. In the interim
| I've installed many Linux and FreeBSD systems for work
| and for play.
| aenis wrote:
| From my purely anecdotal experiences of attending/organizing a
| few 500-person-plus hackstons and dozens of smaller ones, at
| least half of the people I meet there use macs. Its definitely
| in fashion still.
|
| I switched to a m1 mac last year after nearly 4 decades of low
| level x86 work, incl. drivers, rootkits, and the like. These
| days I code in higher level languages such as rust or, ehm,
| python, and the mac offers a fine experience. Ironically, what
| pushed me over the fence was the pandemics; most of the video
| conferencing stuff causes windows laptops to sound like vacuum
| cleaners.
| aidos wrote:
| It did the same to the Macs (even recent models) to be
| honest. The M1 is the only laptop that seems to not die under
| zoom strain.
| zepto wrote:
| The hackers that bought the Macs built startups.
| kensai wrote:
| "Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also
| temporary."
|
| Funny enough, the situation was not temporary, the change in
| trend was real and sustained.
| tootie wrote:
| The tipping point wasn't anything to do with OSX IMO. It was
| iOS. Still my absolutely biggest grudge against Apple is how
| shitty and locked in the iOS ecosystem is. I haven't wanted a
| Mac as a developer machine for the last 5 years but since I
| have to support iOS, I don't have a choice. I had a year
| "break" where I actually needed at Windows machine and it was a
| dream. Touchscreen was so incredibly useful.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| "In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in
| Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software
| that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over
| the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a
| proper use of the Internet"
|
| I also have a girlfriend in Taiwan, and met her while working
| there for 4 years, at a job partly made possible by PTT BBS (a
| very old Telnet web forum). I'm so grateful for VoIP, fast
| Internet connections, and being able to chat to her every night
| (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like Wo Ai Ni in Mandarin).
|
| "If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell
| your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves
| use. It's not enough to make it 'open.' It has to be open and
| good."
|
| Are there any such platforms nowadays, that aren't restricted by
| a walled garden? (says he, typing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro
| running 10.13, while charging his iPhone 4S running jailbroken
| iOS 6.1.3).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like Wo Ai Ni in Mandarin)
|
| Huh? The Ling -Ni pun relies on not making a sound distinction
| which does exist in Mandarin. They sound similar in other
| Chinese languages, not Mandarin.
| robomartin wrote:
| While I have no issues with Apple/MacOS (we own several) or
| Windows (I think the nit-picking is silly) I still remember what
| Apple did in the PowerPC transition. That left a level of
| distrust for the company and how it makes decisions.
|
| Context is important here. I wasn't running my own business at
| the time. I was working for a company that had somewhere around
| 250 Macs and maybe 10 or 20 PC's.
|
| What happened?
|
| Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and
| hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually
| overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and
| resources.
|
| I saw and experienced the pain that caused first hand. From that
| point forward I always had this in the back of my mind. As I
| moved to run my own business with limited funds, the last thing I
| wanted to face was making any investment that could be subject to
| that kind of a pole-shift effect. Macs, for the most part, were
| out.
|
| It's interesting to see the level of nit-picking people on HN
| tend to apply to a PC running Windows. I think things change when
| you are responsible for your own bottom line and have to get
| practical. There's nothing wrong with the hardware or software.
| At least nothing wrong enough to be a deal-breaker. The proof?
| Probably tens to hundreds of millions of companies running all
| kids of businesses just fine using PC's. Compatibility, long term
| viability, cost and cost of ownership (repairs!) are far more
| important than being able to right-click an icon to get a
| convenient function to work.
|
| Microsoft/Windows has always been about long term compatibility.
| That means things evolve slowly. That's OK.
|
| Aside from that, at least in our case, the engineering software
| we run won't work on anything else. In some industries you have
| no other options.
|
| The Linux question and WSL. I don't understand the complaints. I
| run multiple Linux virtual machines on any of our powerful
| Windows desktop or laptops. No issues whatsoever. Some of us
| dual-boot. Other than Linux hardware and other issues, no
| problems at all. In fact, we carefully select our hardware during
| builds (or when buying laptops) in order to ensure the greatest
| level of compatibility with both Windows and Linux software we
| use.
|
| If there is a solid justification for using an Apple machine, I
| am all for it. That's why we have several of them. No issues at
| all. I just don't think the nit-picking is valid or useful any
| more. If you are in business you just want to get shit done.
| There's nothing seriously wrong with quality PC hardware and the
| software ecosystem that runs on it, Linux or Windows.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and
| hardware this company had invested in became obsolete,
| virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount
| of money and resources.
|
| Are you talking about the 68k to PPC transition? Because Apple
| made an enormous amount of effort to ensure both forward and
| back compatibility so I don't think your statement is true at
| all. "Fat binaries" allowed new software to run on 68k systems
| for years after the transition - you could even run 68k Mac
| apps on OS X for a few years!
|
| And future versions of MacOS remained compatible with 68k Macs
| up until (if my memory serves) Mac OS 8.1. Even if you didn't
| upgrade to OS 9, most software ran on 8 anyway just fine.
|
| They had to draw the line somewhere, but you had a _long_ time
| to deal with the transition thanks to Apples efforts.
| robomartin wrote:
| PowerPC to Intel.
|
| The company had very expensive media software suites that
| became incompatible. This isn't about word processors and
| browsers but rather the case of essential and sometimes
| expensive businesses tools.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| For me is more: Exodus from the Mac Or even better: Return of the
| Linux converted Mac. Great machines that can be use many years if
| transformed. The software filoshopy does not relate to the (end
| of)world we are living. People that can afford them is an elite
| and this is not the way to go. Is Tim Cook planning to go to
| space just for fun too? We have a responsibility to the planet!
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