There’s nothing wrong with it if you like it. At work, our servers are windows and I hate them. IN my home lab, I have a couple of guinea pig windows servers to play with and my actual home stack run on various flavors of linux - mainly ubuntu and centos. My gaming rig is windows because i just want to play the game, not play learn how to make the game run. And my workstation that I sit in front of and work at every day is a Mac because at work my job is to fix other people’s shit, and I don’t want to have to fix my own workstation in the middle of a client’s fire like my old windows workstation did to me many a time. I also don’t want to have to learn weird ways to do basic tasks when I’m on the clock like I do with my linux laptop. Every OS has a way that is shines, and if your use case aligns don’t let anybody make you feel bad about it.
I mean Mac OS has its place. There’s a reason so many music producers and coders choose that OS. It’s a rock solid stable approach for those use cases.
That being said, personally I would always prefer Linux but that’s mostly because I don’t do those things.
I don’t even particularly hate windows, I just like PopOS better
Genuine question, how is MacOS better for coders? I think those that do usually choose it because they’re used to it or their company offered either a bulky ThinkPad or a Mac and they wanted something thin and light.
Everytime I see tutorials for setting up or building something there will be a simple Linux install command, downloading a zip for windows (or if you’re lucky you can find it on Choco), and then there will be the multiparagraph homebrew setup.
I don’t really think it’s better. They’re fine for coding.
They’re basically the corporate default because they’re easier for companies to buy and remotely administer, they’ve got good VPN software, good resale value, etc.
Macs are pretty solid for coding. You don’t need to tinker with them, most of the time stuff just works. On the other hand, I spent lots of time to make sure stuff just works well on my Dell or ThinkPad with Ubuntu or pop.
For software, I’ve found that some software doesn’t give you much help if you get into problems on Linux.
And there is always something with Linux that doesn’t work for me. Like my Dell laptop with pop!os doesn’t charge over usb-C from Dell monitor (it worked on windows). Touchscreen doesn’t always work after waking up. I had ThinkPad with awful fan control on linux and hibernation issues. I had issues with scaling with external screens.
yeah it’s mostly because of the official support that reduces a lot of faffing about. I don’t wanna be a nix guru I just want to search stackoveflow and paste in commands when I have issues.
WSL wasn’t a thing when I started with that, and it still doesn’t do everything I want it to, so I much prefer to not use WSL at all and instead manually manage the VM.
There’s nothing wrong with the WSL approach, it’s just not one I like
I code daily on mine, by choice. I also have no issue coding on Linux and will happily spend all day in a CLI. Homebrew is just as easy as using apt or what have you, at least in my personal experience.
It isn’t always perfect.There was a bit of head scratching over shared libraries one time, until I figured out what stupidity I had to do to make Apple happy, but that is the only notable thing I can remember.
However, coding on Windows can be super painful depending on the language, especially with all of the backwards paths. The only coding work I enjoy doing on Windows is C#. Worst case WSL2 is around when I need some sanity.
No matter what, I have any of them available to me and the battery life on a MacBook Air is amazing. The corporate laptop is actually a decent machine and the size and weight is pretty good, especially considering the monstrous bricks the previous models were. Mobile workstation woes I guess. The most amusing part is AutoCAD 2024 running smoothly on the Mac. I never knew it could be that snappy.
macOS offers a lot of stability, it’s reliable, predictable, boring even. It works out of the box and stays that way, it survives upgrades, and rarely crashes.
The release cycle is steady, and changes are generally gradual and incremental. Mac users don’t usually have to worry about a new release breaking their system or their workflow because a developer wants to reinvent the wheel or a UI designer wants to make their mark. The only big shifts have been processor transitions.
The Mac ecosystem also allows users to have a foot in both the proprietary and open source ecosystems on a single platform. Being able to run, say, web development environments and Adobe CS for example, can be a lot easier than farting around with Wine or WSL.
Granted, there’s plenty of downsides to the Mac as well, but the platform definitely has merits.
I’m a dev and I mainly see issues with removed… Every update breaks some tools the cli tools are ancient, homebrew is slow as hell and breaks quite often, docker is really slow and costs money if you don’t know how to avoid that, it’s very expensive to get to a certain amount of RAM that costs nothing on PC and so on.
For my simple local container needs I switched to Podman for that reason. Work gave me a Macbook Pro among my other systems I am wanted to use it as a daily driver to learn the platform better.
I wonder what highly offensive word you wrote in the first line, the only thing I know for sure is that it was clearly filled with misogynistic hate (thanks Lemmy.ml!)
It’s baffling to me that the devs would choose to cripple their own instance. I have not once seen someone use a blocked word in the context where it would be harmful - it is literally always just confusing and annoying.
It is just me wanting to filter 🍎 completely from the instance, so all mentions to 🍎 products get redacted. That is kind of an insider joke due to that company being so prevalent in internet forums such as HN or Reddit. At least in my own instance all mentions of removed are hidden.
Haha interesting, that was absolutely not what I expected. Lemmy.ml bans words like “female dog” and “woman who has sex for money”, so I assumed it was something along those lines since that’s the instance I’m on.
Homebrew recently broke for me permanently on a macbook because it was made in 2013 and is now blocked from upgrading, so xcode no longer can be upgraded…Which means lots of other shit also no longer works. Including homebrew. Soon have to put a distro on it, I guess.
Open core legacy patcher has kept my 2012 MBP able to run modern versions of macos (currently on latest update to Monterey). No stability issues, but AirDrop is flakey and I am no longer able to run anything in a VM using Apple’s hypervisor. It runs well; might be worth looking into for your use case.
I was starting to get issues with a macbook from 2012 (specifically homebrew / xcode) when I upgraded. I’m going to be honest: Having a powerhouse of a machine for 10 years before it becomes obsolete, I’m not going to complain for one second. Got myself a new macbook, and it runs like the wind. Works seamlessly with all the tools I need in an environment where we rely on gfortran / gcc, and a lot of my coworkers use Linux.
To be fair: Part of the reason I waited for so long before upgrading was that I was waiting for them to ditch the butterfly keyboard / touchbar, and get some ports back into the machine. Once they did that I was sold. My only issue with macbooks would be the absurd price for an adequate amount of RAM, but as far as having a good computer, once it’s paid for it’s fantastic.
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 ~
“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)
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).
MacOS is way more often worse than Windows than how Linux does it.
Linux sometimes have important settings hidden in config files that are different in every distro. Sometimes an API is legit worse in Linux, than in Windows.
MacOS has a lot of things that cannot be set at all, constantly deprecated APIs, not to mention it's locked into overpriced hardware. CoreAudio was only better than the Windows native offerings until XAudio came, and Pipewire for Linux seems promising from at least a developer standpoint.
That’s different, in that its grammatical in a dialect but not in Standard American English.
In particular, it’s using the ‘habitual be’. It’s saying something like “people don’t think it always is like it currently is, but it’s always like this.”
Am I missing something? Ctrl-f on en.m.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Futurama_episodes doesnt turn up an episode with that name, and googling “they don’t think it be like it is but it do Futurama” turns up nothing interesting.
They also charge developers for the privilege of compiling their programs for Apple platforms* (and using one of the worst IDEs known to man).
^(*Yes, you can technically compile apps with a free account, but AFAIK they will be restricted to only run on the developer’s machines unless you shell out $99 a year.)
wat? You have the whole gcc suite on macOS. What kind of black magic are you trying to compile? I’ve cross-compiled a bunch of libraries for mac on intel and arm chips without much issues…?
I vividly remember when a friend of mine who runs a small graphic design studio was sent an archive file macOS couldn't open natively and asked me for help. Never having used a Mac and without any clue as to which tools the stupid app shop (which was rather new at the time) held, I couldn't for the life.of me get the blasted thing to obey me, until I found a terminal. I then installed build utils and compiled the frickin' unpacker I needed myself since it only had Linux binaries. Worked like a charm.
I think it’s gotten better, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the countless times MacOS was too stupid to recognize a file type, and absolutely rejected all attempts to tell it what it was. I almost always found a way around it, but it would sometimes take dozens of minutes of fighting with the OS; these times almost made me long for Windows.
Apple’s position that users are fucking idiots may be usually justified, but they consistently violate the “… and make the uncommon possible” rule. The philosophy that the OS is always right is frustrating.
I can agree that fighting apples UI’s can get frustrating (i.e. playing the “try to find the right button” game). What makes me think macs are great is that you get all the freedom you could wish for in a terminal that is unix-compliant, while also getting the reliability of a hugely widespread OS that a bunch of good developers are paid to maintain. With the new macs you also get the apple silicon hardware, which is great.
I think most people that use macs indeed do need the safety rails, but at the same time they bother me. I know how to disable them within 15 mins of setting up my computer, but if I’m helping someone with an issue, I sometimes first need to spend some time disabling safety nets and installing the tools I need. Also: Shoving iCloud storage down my throat is shit. They should stop that.
I know, and trust me, I hate Apple for essentially breaking my computer after an update. But I had my MacBook for 6 years now, use it daily, and have no hiccups other wise.
Yeah, back when I was playing around with terminal not having a package manager was a huge pain in the ass.
As a windows and Mac user who has tried to use Linux multiple times I can’t stand the centralized managers. They never have what I need and then it ends up out of date and not working.
Is there some hidden benefit I’m missing? Because sourcing from the developer seems like the much better way to do it like Mac and Windows.
Easy: Nothing beats the simplicity of brew install whatever or apt install whatever, and then having whateverjust work, in my experience, pretty much every single time.
I’ve not had that experience. I’ve had to go hunting down package names on google before I can install it using the package manager, when instead I could have just downloaded it from their website.
Apt, brew and whatever Arch has have all had the same problems for me. They almost never work out of the box and they’re a major reason I don’t like using Linux on desktop.
Security: if they leave checksums on their website I don’t see how it’s any more secure
Up to date: I definitely haven’t had this experience. Multiple times on arch I had issues where an outdated repo caused an app to not be able to boot
Convenience: That’s subjective. I’ve never really seen much convenience from an all in one solution for anything. I find it more of a hassle to find the distro specific manager that has a terrible UI rather than just downloading directly off a web page
The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released on March 24, 2001. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and all releases from OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to macOS 14 Sonoma are UNIX 03 certified
I don’t like MacOS, but it’s actually able to be called UNIX.
Well you still have to check all the boxes, you pay for the license the same way you can study and take certain exams but have to pay for the certificate.
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