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> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Yes, that's true, but we can also start being sincere about the fact that the whole story is

by jiiam 10y ago

> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Yes, that's true, but we can also start being sincere about the fact that the whole story is BS. I've been recently assigned a mac by my university (never used one before) and I have to say that the ecosystem is at least unhealthy. Maybe mac users don't really care, but having to install a third party software for common tasks like reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep, writing to NTFS, are symptoms, in my opinion, of a too much strong top down interaction between the os and the user. Same goes for the whole "OSX only on Apple hardware" story. So no, Apple isn't shooting temselves in the foot, but surely they are disrespecting the end user. You can excuse that by saying that it is business, but I would reply that it is still true and by avoiding to talk about it we are implicitly doing Apple a favor by hiding the issues with what would otherwise be a great piece of software. We should say more often that these practices are bad for the consumer.

AlexeyBrin 10y ago
> writing to NTFS Ever tried to write to HFS+ or to EXT3 from Windows ? Did it work without installing a third party tool ? > reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  > You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options. It only works for a single device. So if you want to keep natural scrolling on the trackpad and use regular scrolling on a external mouse, you can't. For some reasons the two checkboxes for this (even under different panes) are linked. https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
pjmlp 10y ago
It is that market of small utilities that puts money in the pockets of developers that care about the desktop experience, and that isn't exclusive of Apple systems.
- jiiam 10y ago
  This simply means that Apple would rather outsource the job and make some small developer happy and a few users (like me) unhappy, rather than improve their highly praised interface. By the way, there is an ecosystem of excellent small utilities developed open source for linux that are, in my opinions, superior to the ones on OSX, or at least, the one I work and am familiar with. Of course open source produces many useless tools, but I've also found unusable applets for mac, so... Windows is of course out of the equation.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    No, it means there are some developers out there that are happy to earn their income and pay their bills developing software for desktop users, something that doesn't really exist in GNU/Linux. Living from donations isn't really a sustainable thing.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
open a command line and type "caff<tab>". comes built in.
- jiiam 10y ago
  Thanks. The problem is that opening a terminal is always a pain since spotlight sends me to the one already open. I know that I should set up a shortcut to open a terminal...
72deluxe 10y ago
Reverse scrolling? It's an option on the touchpad / mouse settings to scroll naturally/unnaturally isn't it? Going to sleep - it's under power options in Settings. Also writing to NTFS is not a problem they care about. When's the last time you wrote to ext4 or HFS+ on Windows natively without extra tools? It's exactly the same here - they support HFS, HFS+ and FAT32 and VFAT. Windows supports NTFS and FAT32 and VFAT. Do we get upset with Microsoft because they don't support HFS+?
- jiiam 10y ago
  > Reverse scrolling? It's an option on the touchpad / mouse settings to scroll naturally/unnaturally Yes, but do you want to have different setting for your trackpad and mouse at the same time? You need a third party software. It's not as bad as I told the story > Going to sleep - it's under power options in Settings But I don't want to open the settings and change the behavior of the whole system if I right now need to have it awake for 10 minutes. Sure I could launch `caffeinate` on a terminal, but a clickable applet would be better. But of course it's either paid or buggy. > writing to NTFS is not a problem they care about. As to say, they don't care about something very basic that their users might need and don't need much implementation. In fact I think you can simply `mount -t <ntfs_or_something>` your drive or add a line to `/etc/fstab`, but you won't have it in finder. > When's the last time you wrote to ext4 or HFS+ on Windows natively without extra tools? This just makes windows a worse OS. If you compare it to a real OS, like your favorite linux variant, you can. > Do we get upset with Microsoft because they don't support HFS+? Actually I do. This is exactly what I'm talking about: it's just a business practice to enforce their own standards, since the whole implementation wouldn't be so hard: they could just add a pop up upon installation that says "This software is not guaranteed to work, use at your own risk". In the end, it is clear that a OS which support more FSes (especially the most widespread ones) is better than the same OS without that feature, and I say we should complain that we can't get it.
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    So if I'm right, you're complaining that MacOS and Windows aren't Linux? I think you are expecting the wrong thing from the OS. How do you keep Windows awake for 10 minutes only? Proper NTFS support on Linux is only recent (and I don't think it supports all the excellent features of NTFS). If an OS vendor adds in support for something that is only partial or offers messages regarding "this isn't really supported", either a) nobody would use it, or b) people would use it and complain. It is safer to release something complete, or not at all. And since "typical" Mac users aren't trying to mount ext4, ReiserFS, XFS or NTFS on their machines I can see why they would not support it. For comparison, when's the last time you used COM or DCOM on Linux or Mac? When's the last time you ran a Cocoa app on Linux? Does it sicken you that RedHat and SUSE won't pull their finger out and support these technologies? Why doesn't RedHat release a driver for SQL Server ODBC support independent of Microsoft? They must be attempting to force their own Linux-centric monopoly! You can see how foolish this sounds. It is based on unrealistic expectations.

by jiiam 10y ago

AlexeyBrin 10y ago

> writing to NTFS Ever tried to write to HFS+ or to EXT3 from Windows ? Did it work without installing a third party tool ? > reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options.

laurentdc 10y ago
> You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options. It only works for a single device. So if you want to keep natural scrolling on the trackpad and use regular scrolling on a external mouse, you can't. For some reasons the two checkboxes for this (even under different panes) are linked. https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

pjmlp 10y ago

It is that market of small utilities that puts money in the pockets of developers that care about the desktop experience, and that isn't exclusive of Apple systems.

jiiam 10y ago
This simply means that Apple would rather outsource the job and make some small developer happy and a few users (like me) unhappy, rather than improve their highly praised interface. By the way, there is an ecosystem of excellent small utilities developed open source for linux that are, in my opinions, superior to the ones on OSX, or at least, the one I work and am familiar with. Of course open source produces many useless tools, but I've also found unusable applets for mac, so... Windows is of course out of the equation.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  No, it means there are some developers out there that are happy to earn their income and pay their bills developing software for desktop users, something that doesn't really exist in GNU/Linux. Living from donations isn't really a sustainable thing.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

open a command line and type "caff<tab>". comes built in.

jiiam 10y ago
Thanks. The problem is that opening a terminal is always a pain since spotlight sends me to the one already open. I know that I should set up a shortcut to open a terminal...

72deluxe 10y ago

Reverse scrolling? It's an option on the touchpad / mouse settings to scroll naturally/unnaturally isn't it? Going to sleep - it's under power options in Settings. Also writing to NTFS is not a problem they care about. When's the last time you wrote to ext4 or HFS+ on Windows natively without extra tools? It's exactly the same here - they support HFS, HFS+ and FAT32 and VFAT. Windows supports NTFS and FAT32 and VFAT. Do we get upset with Microsoft because they don't support HFS+?

jiiam 10y ago
> Reverse scrolling? It's an option on the touchpad / mouse settings to scroll naturally/unnaturally Yes, but do you want to have different setting for your trackpad and mouse at the same time? You need a third party software. It's not as bad as I told the story > Going to sleep - it's under power options in Settings But I don't want to open the settings and change the behavior of the whole system if I right now need to have it awake for 10 minutes. Sure I could launch `caffeinate` on a terminal, but a clickable applet would be better. But of course it's either paid or buggy. > writing to NTFS is not a problem they care about. As to say, they don't care about something very basic that their users might need and don't need much implementation. In fact I think you can simply `mount -t <ntfs_or_something>` your drive or add a line to `/etc/fstab`, but you won't have it in finder. > When's the last time you wrote to ext4 or HFS+ on Windows natively without extra tools? This just makes windows a worse OS. If you compare it to a real OS, like your favorite linux variant, you can. > Do we get upset with Microsoft because they don't support HFS+? Actually I do. This is exactly what I'm talking about: it's just a business practice to enforce their own standards, since the whole implementation wouldn't be so hard: they could just add a pop up upon installation that says "This software is not guaranteed to work, use at your own risk". In the end, it is clear that a OS which support more FSes (especially the most widespread ones) is better than the same OS without that feature, and I say we should complain that we can't get it.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  So if I'm right, you're complaining that MacOS and Windows aren't Linux? I think you are expecting the wrong thing from the OS. How do you keep Windows awake for 10 minutes only? Proper NTFS support on Linux is only recent (and I don't think it supports all the excellent features of NTFS). If an OS vendor adds in support for something that is only partial or offers messages regarding "this isn't really supported", either a) nobody would use it, or b) people would use it and complain. It is safer to release something complete, or not at all. And since "typical" Mac users aren't trying to mount ext4, ReiserFS, XFS or NTFS on their machines I can see why they would not support it. For comparison, when's the last time you used COM or DCOM on Linux or Mac? When's the last time you ran a Cocoa app on Linux? Does it sicken you that RedHat and SUSE won't pull their finger out and support these technologies? Why doesn't RedHat release a driver for SQL Server ODBC support independent of Microsoft? They must be attempting to force their own Linux-centric monopoly! You can see how foolish this sounds. It is based on unrealistic expectations.