You’re getting ratio’d but you’re right. Core parts of the user experience are steaming piles of dogshit while people praise MacOS for its many gimmicks.
Finder is an absolute pile of shit and gets first time users addicted to bad habits. It takes digging through hidden settings to even make it match the out of the box functionality that Windows Explorer offers and it still can’t match the full potential of Explorer for file management. The integrated search is unpredictable and fuzzy so they went and made Spotlight its own thing.
Window management is a nightmare if you’re actually trying to do multiple things at once without switching windows. Mac OS has not implemented window snapping for years and they still managed to make it suck when they did. Not once have they considered stealing great ideas from the tiling window managers, Apple simply decided to reinvent the wheel and make it square.
Got multiple applications running at the same time while minimized? Lol, get fucked. The only way to know what’s actually running at a glance is the shitty little dot below the dock icon and restoring a specific window takes either way too many clicks or requires you to know the magic keyboard shortcut for untangling your windows (another gimmick they added later in order to actually make the OS usable bearable).
Got any sort of issue during startup? Here, take this black screen with a single icon. Not even a slight hint as to what the actual problem might be and if you should worry about it. MacOS might seem like a stable OS but that is mainly because it is very well integrated with the limited set of hardware it can actually run on. If any real issues do come up, the troubleshooting experience is basically just a giant “get fucked” sign pointing to the nearest Apple store.
Sometimes simplicity is a good thing, but usually designing something to be accessible means severely limiting the amount of depth you can go into as an experienced user. Every aspect of the OS and the tools that come with it share this overall problem that there’s just not much depth to what you can do with it. Can’t have a steep learning curve if there’s just nothing to learn.
And I feel like none of these are unreasonable. I like using the right tools for the right jobs, which is why I run Windows for heavy productivity and engineering work. Desktop Linux has come a long way but it just doesn’t (yet) have the required toolset to support engineering workflows. While programming of any kind and getting more complex data wrangling done is best done using Linux. My server needs are also best covered by Linux as most distributions can be run without all the bloat that Windows comes with. And I am sure as shit not paying for Windows Server.
I just can’t find a valid reason for using MacOS. It seems to combine the worst of both worlds into an OS that’s like a trial experience of actually using a computer to get things done.
What out of the box functionality are you missing? As for search, from context I’m going to assume you are not being sarcastic. Windows search has to be the single worst search I’ve ever fucking encountered. Say I made a picture of a bird. I called it bird.jpg, and saved it in my pictures folder. Now, I type ‘bird’ into explorer search, and it gives me a fucking DLL FILE called matrixRRT.dll. I waited literal minutes for this? Literally the advice on all over the internet for making windows search better is to use something else instead.
*Agreed, window snapping is better in Windows.
*It’s been a hot minute since I used anything other than Expose to choose which window I want (Which is great, btw) but don’t you just click and hold on the dock icon?
*Agreed, more troubleshooting on startup would be handy. But to be fair, I’ve had way more startup issues with my windows box than my Mac. In fact, the last Mac startup issue I think I had would have been about six years ago. Whereas I’ve probably had six in the last year alone on the Windows machine. Sample size of one, of course. shrug
I’m not blind to the fact that Windows has a terrible search experience, but I won’t say it’s the worst. Out of the box it is fucking useless, but if you actually take the time to index specific paths and make use of the metadata options in Explorer you can actually get some decent results in reasonable time.
Apple had the right idea with Spotlight, it’s just sad that both parties can’t properly integrate the functionality into their file managers.
My search needs are mostly covered by Voidtools’ Everything, which is able to scan through the whole NTFS partition in a matter of milliseconds for realtime results. The caveat being that you have to know the name of the file you’re looking for. Otherwise I just use Powertoys Run for search and application launching needs, which is what Spotlight could have been if it was made by passionate nerds.
I do realise this makes my argument lose it’s bite somewhat, but it comes down to user experience. MacOS has a terrible out of the box experience that can’t be fixed, use something else instead. Windows has a terrible out of the box experience that can be fixed to some degree if you take some time to learn how it works, but you can still opt to not bother with any of it and use something else instead.
Linux was always going to be the clear winner here.
Now for the dock icon strategy: try doing that repeatedly with multiple instances/windows from the same application and compare the experience to the “never combine, show labels” taskbar in Windows. I guarantee there is going to be a clear winner in terms of usability. As always, under Linux is not an issue because you can just do whatever the fuck you want.
The troubleshooting bullshit a pattern seen in all of Apple’s products. They have a habit of hiding all important information in case of an issue, and I have had this complaint about all the iDevices I’ve had the displeasure of touching over the years. iPhone update failed? Tough shit, have a red message saying “something went wrong, try again”. Fan controllers randomly stuck on 100% speed on an iMac without the ability to get any information about the sensors. None of the system tools provide any information beyond the bare minimum. I’ve come to a point where I just refuse to help any family member having trouble with an Apple device because it turns into a multi-hour wild goose chase.
I’d argue having an overall stable experience with the occasional vague issues that can’t be troubleshooted is worse than having slightly more frequent issues that actually lead to a solution. Apple’s products by design teach the user nothing about technology because there’s no entry-point to the knowledge itself. Meanwhile Windows, while flawed, does provide the user with an incentive to learn about proper maintenance and troubleshooting which leads to more competent users overall.
Last but not least, the command line: I love my experience using package managers on both Linux and lately also on Windows with winget. It has quickly become the main way I install and manage most utilities. MacOS has options but none of them are integrated neatly and have to be installed separately.
Even on Windows I use command line utilities where I can and GUI functionality where it makes sense. While the realm of possibilities is not as broad as the GNU/Linux world provides, I at least feel I have a great deal of control over what I do. MacOS is an impostor that has murdered a UNIX distribution and is wearing its skin. The terminal experience feels like it’s a remnant from the early days that they never bothered to put any more love into but they can’t get rid of it either. Just like some of those Windows 3.0 components you can still find in the modern versions of the OS.
I’m 100% done with Apple and their products because they make everything I’m trying to do slightly more difficult and annoying than the alternative. And those are just limited to my issues with the way they do software. I also have very valid issues with the way they design hardware and with the way they conduct business (ethics, monopolies, their overall effect on tech markets in general).
Just yesterday I updated an 8bitdo controller’s firmware. I just keep a laptop with windows around for this sort of nonsense. And no, it’s one of the older ones that do not work with the android app, not that using the app is any better.
Personally prefer :xprobably because it’s a little more ergonomic, as Z is all the way in the corner (QWERTY), and is the same key twice, while : and x are in two different spots, and can therefore be hit faster.
I know, it’s like millisecond differences, but, hey, I’m a vim user.
:x will save and exit. The difference between :x and :wq is that the latter will always write to the buffer, while the former will only do so if theres a change.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
It's funny, the only Linux software I've ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.
I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri didn't run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.
There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
“Very weird to the UNIX world”??? It’s the only one that’s actually UNIX.
The only complaints on this entire post are down to people that have no idea what they’re doing. It’s full-on Dunning-Krueger. There are plenty of training wheels, but they are trivial to disable/bypass if needed. People need to get a lot more comfortable with justifying their preferences with “I don’t like it” rather than inventing problems and proving their own ignorance.
BSD is, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (and every other open-source descendant) are not unix-certified, so they are not. BSD was discontinued in 1995 so I assumed that was not what the meme is referencing.
I honestly don’t see why, when I’m looking for help on some problem on a mac, I’ll happily open a Linux forum, and throw whatever commands I need into the terminal. Works like a charm every time. Just replace apt with brew or some other reasonable package manager (idk if macports or whatever is actually any decent, never tried it)
10 years ago is giving Apple too much credit. They were using Intel processors then, ARM now. For now, you can still run Intel applications, but that won’t last much longer.
More importantly, a 10 year old application is likely to use Carbon instead of Cocoa. Unless it’s an extremely simple application (i.e. hello world), it is unlikely to run.
Then there’s the depreciation of resource forks, a new filesystem, tons and tons of extra security restrictions, etc.
Carbon wasn’t that prevalent 10 years ago. 15, maybe. 20, definitely.
10 years ago, Carbon was already officially deprecated, and it had clearly been a second-class citizen for years before that. Most apps were already using Cocoa at that point.
They could’ve easily continue going the Catalina way (you can allow 32-bit programs to run after a warning if upgraded from an older OS), but they didn’t. I don’t understand why they forced 64-bit on Big Sur, it breaks so many old, non-updated apps and they know that.
Yea, there’s a lot of (well deserved) shitting on Windows, but it’s backwards compatibility is second to none. Not even Linux can give you a >70% chance that a piece of software or game you need/want from 1995 will still run (provided it’s not 16bit only or needs a proprietary driver lmao) on a modern version of the OS
Months ago I wanted to run a lot of my old childhood games (mostly between 94 and 2001 release dates) for my own kids and I found most of them still installed and ran right out of the box on fully updated Win10, a lot of the rest required some fiddling with compatibility settings and the rest just didn’t work because they were 16 bit only (You can still get them working natively if you install 32 bit Win10, but subjecting children to <4gb RAM is abuse) or some other weird issue so I fell back to ScummVM/DosBox for those
The comment you replied to says the opposite. It’s a half-truth, but Linux+WINE does some backwards compatibility better than Windows.
First, Wine doesn’t have an arbitrary limitation against running 16-bit executables AFAIK
Second, there is anecdotal evidence of some older games breaking to graphics driver updates on Windows, but running fine (or even faster!) on Linux thanks to a much more straightforward graphical stack (and the fact that DXVK is dark magic). Even something as simple as fullscreen mode support on old games can be a buggy and flickery pain in the ass, whereas on Linux the same binary will work flawlessly with any decent compositor.
The limitation isn’t really arbitrary once you put a processor in in long mode (64 bit) it can’t do Virtual 8086 Mode any more. One of those things AMD did when designing 64-bit mode to clean up that particular can of hysterical raisins.
…also, even back in the days processors were fast enough to run that old stuff under DOSEMU. Which you probably want to do anyway as you don’t have a Roland MT-32.
Oh, EDIT: I had once fullscreen issues under wine, and that was Witcher 3, not the current upgrade the older one: Alt-tabbing away worked perfectly, but the game didn’t properly recognise that it had lost and re-gained focus, refusing to go out of pause. Switching fullscreen mode in-game (fullscreen to borderless or the other way around) fixed that.
Wayland is way better with fullscreen than x11, btw, especially considering that there’s still the occasional SDL1 game around, those will right-out switch your video mode and disable alt+tab.
I concur on Wayland being particularly great. The only downside is forced V-sync, I don’t know if there is a (proposed) protocol extension to do direct framebuffer writes in fullscreen.
I’m pretty sure every compositor worth its salt (that is, kde or wlroots-based) reparents on fullscreen. KDE also does variable refresh rate and at that point I’m happy – I’m not playing competitive shooters any more and VRR is such an upgrade I’m not even noticing frame rates dropping. Back in the days not hitting 60 was terrible, sometimes I had to settle for 30 (though before LCDs you could do rates in between), now I can go “ah, around 40-50 but I like the bling let’s keep it at that”. Dropped frames are simply magnitudes worse than delayed frames.
A lot of those old games have been repackaged for Windows as well on GoG or Steam, not all but a decent amount. Jazz Jackrabbit series I still play occasionally, there’s a claymation point-and-click called The Neverhood (by the Earth Worm Jim guy) that works out of the box, and my personal favorite Battlezone 98 Redux which is a repackage of the game you can get on Steam, best multiplayer first person rts ever.
I like to think of it like a defense mechanism. By ensuring old abandoned software won’t work, you don’t have to worry about it having a major security vulnerability. Any old software that still works probably isn’t abandoned.
No offense, but that sounds a lot like apple and Microsoft arguing against freedom of the user.
“Installing an app from outside the app store could introduce a security vulnerability”
“We must have edge installed at all times to provide a good user experience. Replacing such a central part of the operating system could weaken the security of the device”
I see your point, but unfortunately, there’s lots of proprietary old software that has been abandoned by the original company (Either because they went out of business or just moved on) that’s still in active use and the source never released.
There was just an article on Lemmy a few weeks ago on how multi-million dollar research facilities still have to use ancient software to run critical scientific machines. Although in that particular case they had to maintain old PCs as well because of proprietary drivers
Had to show a person today how to install Nextcloud. Literally Nextcloud and we couldnt find a way to move to the home folder. Its somewhere in a menu but damn macos is fucking weird, like a toy.
I always thought it was like “the apple unix” or “the better ios which doesnt suck” but actually it seems just as locked down and childish like a toy.
The Home folder is there, but you just didn’t know how to find it. What you experienced was “not knowing what you’re doing” which just means you needed to learn how to use what you were trying to use.
Nah, its the OS actively hiding stuff. Just like windows and Android forcing you to use their folder structure.
I may be a bit linuxy here, but thats literally what my dad told me, and on Windows it makes more sense, to put everything in the main directory and use CAPITALS for folders only so you see they are yours.
For sure one could argue macos is just different and you can use that top menu, but what are the shortcut buttons there for? Its a decision and it felt veeeery weird. Even though it may be fixable
As Richard Stallman said: Steve Jobs created a cage and made it so shiny that millions of people want to be trapped in it (From memory so not exact, just search Richard Stallman Apple fanboys are fools)
MacOS gets much more fluid to use when you memorize the keyboard commands. Command+Shift+G in the Finder brings up a menu where you can type any path you want, including ~
I have the feeling these editors only make sense on US keyboards. Like “:” for what? This is not a primary sign anywhere, why not just control like a normal person, working on every keyboard?
emacs is close to that besides all the ctrl+ combinations being nonsensical. the actual reason either arent very popular is the steep initial curve and the fact that most people dont even care about editing text that much and also the delayed gratification for the amount of time it takes to get used to. but once ure used to vim u kinda want vim everywhere
Yes this makes sense. Linux running a 25yr old binary would throw errors for shared libraries, or kernel compatibility or just the fact it’s the wrong arch type.
Did that as a work project on Unix. My peer had a similar porting project.
I thought I was screwed: 20-year-old c-based backup tool. His was easy: this perl web app is installing on a new box because its old one is being lifecycled.
Actual: after 3 weeks of dependency hell he tossed it all and rewrote the thing in c from scratch overnight. My c project was make;make-install with no errors.
I think it’s been recompiled a few times since then, without any code changes.
In my experience, on Windows a lot of old stuff runs as long as you have whatever registry setting enabled that lets you run non 64 bit programs. This isn’t available on every windows pc but if you’re running it on your home pc, you can probably get it. A lot of old games don’t work but old things that don’t use graphics almost always run.
In wine, it’s basically the same story. A lot of old stuff runs especially non graphical old stuff. Some old windows games don’t work on wine but just because something old doesn’t work on Windows doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work on wine and vice versa.
I would rate wine as slightly more compatible with late 90s and early 2000s games than Windows is but ymmv. Graphics stuff tends to work a little more often on wine. Some mid 2000s games use obscure hacks that are impossible to ever get running on wine.
registry setting enabled that lets you run non 64 bit programs
Do they seriously not support 32bit software out of the box anymore? I know getting 16bit software to run on x64 is close to impossible (look up NTVDM x64) for obvious reasons but there is still lots of x86-only stuff.
That’s what I thought because that was my experience last time I used Windows; that’s why it surprised me that the previous comment suggested otherwise.
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