3 ms·

Some of you Mac guys are a weird bunch IMO: Talk more than others about usability - happily gloss over all kinds of weirdness[0] in your expensive setups.[1]

Some of you Mac guys are a weird bunch IMO: Talk more than others about usability - happily gloss over all kinds of weirdness[0] in your expensive setups.[1] Happily pays quite a lot for your Macs - "regret every cent" after donating peanuts for the development of a Linux distro. Just saying. Edit: downvotes welcome! I cannot buy anything for my Internet points here in Western Europe. A textual description of my wrongdoings would be even more awesome! Edit2: you don't need to upvote me! Instead just tell me what I did wrong! [0]: Yes, there is. If you cannot spot it I won't recommend you for any lead UX role. [1]: Not saying it is bad or not worth the price though. Just expensive (given that you have to have a Mac to run it legally) and far from perfect.

ajmurmann 10y ago
I also never thought that the UX was particularly good. It looks pretty, but some fundamental stuff is hidden and when I was new to OS X I never knew when I had to switch to terminal. To me the real reason to run OS X is that I never have to fight with drivers or my xconfig. On Ubuntu plugging in a projector to give a presentation was always more exciting than it should have been. I more often than not had to borrow someone else's Windows laptop. I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one. Last time I gave Ubuntu a try a few years ago it actually managed to destroy the firmware on my external screen. I just want a Unix based system that works.
- gst 10y ago
  > I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one. I don't think it's fair to compare OS X (with runs on a very limited set of hardware) with a Linux distribution running on a random not-well-supported system. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison I'd suggest to test Ubuntu on one of the officially supported systems - see https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ for a list.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    It's fair when you consider the usual value proposition of "do I buy a PC and put linux on it or do I buy a Mac". But you are right, some people mix these different issues up. My next laptop will come with Linux pre-installed - so I expect to report that all the bits work correctly (except Linux will be running on top of Qubes rather than on the metal, so...)
pinum 10y ago
OSX has plenty of weirdness, but in my experience it's still more usable by far than Windows and a million miles away from any desktop Linux distro. I use it because it's the best available, not because it's perfect in every possible way. It's not, and nothing is. But it's a generally excellent GUI around a UNIX core, which is perfect for me. I hackintosh so I'm less well-placed to answer your second point, but I'll try: A Mac is expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting and you know it will work well (recent dongle madness notwithstanding). Meanwhile, eOS markets itself (previously implicitly and now apparently explicitly) as a potential replacement for OSX. But it's nowhere near. It's an outdated version of Ubuntu with some basic custom apps on top (a calculator, another basic wrapper around webkit, a slightly cleaned up fork of a file browser, etc). And then you stray to the third party apps, and as always with desktop Linux, they're awful. Everything uses a slightly different toolkit, the UI elements are ugly, UX seems to be devs' lowest priority item, and of course you can't completely interact with industry standard formats (DOCX, PSD). The Intel Mesa driver still tears and/or stutters (actually all drivers do except Nvidia's) so watching videos is an awful experience. Most of those items above are not fatal by themselves, but together they make for a miserable experience. I used desktop Linux (mainly Ubuntu) for over a year since I needed to do some dev and couldn't run OSX at the time. I won't try again unless there's a revolution in the desktop FOSS world. (Good video drivers, standard well-designed toolkit, UX as a priority, deeper integration of things like WINE.) I do have some family members who use ancient core2duo laptops and do absolutely everything in Chrome. I pop Ubuntu MATE on their machines so they can avoid malware. I also always keep a live USB stick handy for flexible troubleshooting. As far as I'm concerned, this is basically the limit of usefulness for desktop Linux. I understand some people value the flexibility above everything else and thrive under desktop Linux. I'm not trying to devalue their views or say that their setup is wrong. Use whatever works for you- but if you haven't gave OSX a serious shot yet, do try it.
kitsunesoba 10y ago
I don't think anybody is saying that macOS is perfect. It's more that historically for most of us, the set of trade offs that come with it are much easier to swallow than those that come with $DESKTOP_LINUX_DISTRO. In fact, that's the core of the problem: even now, after all that he missteps Apple has taken and after all the improvements desktop Linux has seen, macOS is still the more appealing option. This is frustrating because it suggests that there may never be another desktop platform with a set of pros and cons similar to those of macOS.

ajmurmann 10y ago

I also never thought that the UX was particularly good. It looks pretty, but some fundamental stuff is hidden and when I was new to OS X I never knew when I had to switch to terminal. To me the real reason to run OS X is that I never have to fight with drivers or my xconfig. On Ubuntu plugging in a projector to give a presentation was always more exciting than it should have been. I more often than not had to borrow someone else's Windows laptop. I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one. Last time I gave Ubuntu a try a few years ago it actually managed to destroy the firmware on my external screen. I just want a Unix based system that works.

gst 10y ago
> I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one. I don't think it's fair to compare OS X (with runs on a very limited set of hardware) with a Linux distribution running on a random not-well-supported system. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison I'd suggest to test Ubuntu on one of the officially supported systems - see https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ for a list.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  It's fair when you consider the usual value proposition of "do I buy a PC and put linux on it or do I buy a Mac". But you are right, some people mix these different issues up. My next laptop will come with Linux pre-installed - so I expect to report that all the bits work correctly (except Linux will be running on top of Qubes rather than on the metal, so...)

pinum 10y ago

OSX has plenty of weirdness, but in my experience it's still more usable by far than Windows and a million miles away from any desktop Linux distro. I use it because it's the best available, not because it's perfect in every possible way. It's not, and nothing is. But it's a generally excellent GUI around a UNIX core, which is perfect for me. I hackintosh so I'm less well-placed to answer your second point, but I'll try: A Mac is expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting and you know it will work well (recent dongle madness notwithstanding). Meanwhile, eOS markets itself (previously implicitly and now apparently explicitly) as a potential replacement for OSX. But it's nowhere near. It's an outdated version of Ubuntu with some basic custom apps on top (a calculator, another basic wrapper around webkit, a slightly cleaned up fork of a file browser, etc). And then you stray to the third party apps, and as always with desktop Linux, they're awful. Everything uses a slightly different toolkit, the UI elements are ugly, UX seems to be devs' lowest priority item, and of course you can't completely interact with industry standard formats (DOCX, PSD). The Intel Mesa driver still tears and/or stutters (actually all drivers do except Nvidia's) so watching videos is an awful experience. Most of those items above are not fatal by themselves, but together they make for a miserable experience. I used desktop Linux (mainly Ubuntu) for over a year since I needed to do some dev and couldn't run OSX at the time. I won't try again unless there's a revolution in the desktop FOSS world. (Good video drivers, standard well-designed toolkit, UX as a priority, deeper integration of things like WINE.) I do have some family members who use ancient core2duo laptops and do absolutely everything in Chrome. I pop Ubuntu MATE on their machines so they can avoid malware. I also always keep a live USB stick handy for flexible troubleshooting. As far as I'm concerned, this is basically the limit of usefulness for desktop Linux. I understand some people value the flexibility above everything else and thrive under desktop Linux. I'm not trying to devalue their views or say that their setup is wrong. Use whatever works for you- but if you haven't gave OSX a serious shot yet, do try it.

kitsunesoba 10y ago

I don't think anybody is saying that macOS is perfect. It's more that historically for most of us, the set of trade offs that come with it are much easier to swallow than those that come with $DESKTOP_LINUX_DISTRO. In fact, that's the core of the problem: even now, after all that he missteps Apple has taken and after all the improvements desktop Linux has seen, macOS is still the more appealing option. This is frustrating because it suggests that there may never be another desktop platform with a set of pros and cons similar to those of macOS.