67 ms·

Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

• juped 7y ago
  I will say that Mac OS is incredibly disk-hungry (and MBPs get vastly more expensive when you add options like bigger (still not that big) disks). I don't want to become a Mac OS hobbyist and figure out how this happens (I like Mac OS overall because it's a BSD and I'm a BSD guy, but it is not my hobby BSD of choice) so I ended up just spending a few bucks on some "cleaner" program that purged a surprisingly huge amount of disk the first run and purges like 5 gigs a week thereafter. I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk.
  • Torwald 7y ago
    What is wrong with using a lot of disk? If apps start faster, run faster, then using more disk is a good trade-off.
    • 72deluxe 7y ago
      Because you're tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that you can't upgrade and the system hogging disk space reduces the space left to store the colossal 4K videos that every phone shoots these days and the VM snapshots you need? Also every iOS virtual image includes identical files so you end up with about 5 GB of identical sample photos and other garbage for each iPhone image. Why they can't put them in a single directory and symbolically link to them is beyond me. I say this with a 2012 MacBook that I've put a 1TB SSD in and a 2016 MacBook Pro with a fixed non-upgradeable SSD. Constantly fighting for disk space.
    • jablan 7y ago
      Unless there is some compression involved, using more disk means slower starting and running apps. Edit: even with compression, I'd argue that uncompressing is faster than reading disk.
    • Hurtak 7y ago
      It is good tradeoff, except when you start running out of space, MacOS does not seem to clear the caches when you start running out of space. I have 128GB MacBook Pro and removing the ~/Library/Caches was somewhat regular excercise (it occupies 5-10GB usually) I had to do when I had lots of stuff installed.
    • whywhywhywhy 7y ago
      Nothing at all until you work somewhere that only buys 128GB models and the drives are soldered to the main board.
    • juped 7y ago
      - they don't start or run faster - to borrow another commenter's words, I'm tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that I can't upgrade (fortunately, I don't have 4k videos; unfortunately, I have too many d----d VM snapshots and the like)
  • wila 7y ago
    > I honestly don't know why it uses so much disk. Not saying it is your issue, but if you do use Time Machine, have it enabled all the time and you are not always connected to your Time Machine backup disk then Time Machine will continue to make those backups except it does them to your local disk. Because of this you will end up with time machine snapshots and you can get rid of them using the tmutil command that was referenced in the post. In order to do so, see for example [1]. In earlier macOS versions you could disable the local time machine snapshots, but I seem to recall that that no longer works (but I might be wrong on that) [1] https://ppolyzos.com/2017/10/20/how-to-manually-delete-local-snapshots-from-time-machines-backups/ https://ppolyzos.com/2017/10/20/how-to-manually-delete-local...
• loktarogar 7y ago
  None of these are the experiences I have. The most concrete example - my laptop has 4 USB-C ports.
• deepGem 7y ago
  "There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad." Isn't this sentiment a bit excessive. Homebrew is a perfectly safe and accepted way of installing software.
  • diffeomorphism 7y ago
    Will that be affected by the notarization requirements in the future? https://discourse.brew.sh/t/code-signing-installed-executables/2131/9 https://discourse.brew.sh/t/code-signing-installed-executabl...
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Homebrew will remain unaffected, since it does not set the quarantine bit on its binaries (which are usually invoked from the terminal anyways). Homebrew Cask opts in to Gatekeeper so it’ll be subject to notarization requirements.
  • heelhook 7y ago
    Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux, both back in 2000 and now. Notoriously ./autogen.sh && make && make install wasn't mentioned but installing via `rpm|dpkg|apt|yum` is?
    • tannhaeuser 7y ago
      autogen.sh isn't intended to be invoked for user installs. Users are supposed to invoke ./configure, with the configure script being generated by a developer invoking autogen.sh and readily packaged as part of the software's tarball.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      > Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux Technically true, but practically false. To this day I get told that I shouldn't be even trying to use software that isn't in the repo. There are still a whole lot of applications released with a Windows binary and a tar.xz of source for Linux. At DebConf 2014, none other than Linus himself bitched out the community for how difficult distributing things for Linux was. It should not require an army of maintainers across a score of repos to distribute software. And it isn't like the technology to make it simple isn't available. AppImage has been around since 2004 (it was called Klik at the time) and its existence has and continues to be largely ignored by the community. Other parts of the community are openly hostile to the very concept of simple application distribution, like Drew DeVault. The situation is so awful, that recently when I wanted to use an application on my Linux laptop I found it easier to run the Windows version under WINE than get the Linux version installed. And the most infuriating thing about it all is how incredibly resistant the community is to doing anything to change this situation.
• throwaway-hn123 7y ago
  Such a dull post.
• gmac 7y ago
  Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit. Really? My experience of calling Apple tech support (to troubleshoot something to do with Messages on my Mac) was that they were surprisingly well-informed, and they fixed my issue with approximately zero patronising, script-parroting, is-it-turned-on? nonsense.
  • Angostura 7y ago
    Somewhat similar. In my case, they got me to install a debugging profile and spent quite a while scrutinising the output
  • consp 7y ago
    > is-it-turned-on? Is not nonsense as most simple problems are caused by simple mistakes. Don't reflect your experience with computers and tools to the average user's experience.
    • gmac 7y ago
      Well, OK, it’s reasonable place to start, but I think most of the HN crowd will have experienced the frustration of being unable to break out of that model. Obligatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/806/ https://www.xkcd.com/806/
    • SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      Uhh it’s an extremely stupid question if they’re asking for support about a word processor bug visible on screen. Blindly defending arbitrary practices out of context is stupid. Stop doing it.
  • time0ut 7y ago
    My one experience with Apple support was a complete disappointment. iOS 11 made my iPhone 6+ unusable. Their only suggestion was to try rebooting it. This was right before the battery scandal broke.
• ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  redacted
  • jsjohnst 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • Jonnax 7y ago
    Perhaps they don't care because your issues with Apple are not their issues?
    • ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      They will be once their warranty is out.
• tasogare 7y ago
  I had the same issue with XCode update. Today, the download finally started, progress bar reached 100% then... XCode was not installed. Infuriating. Too bad Microsoft don’t allow easy access to LTSB and destroyed Windows UI. I feel the state of commercial OS declined sharply in the last decade.
  • jsjohnst 7y ago
    Are you on Catalina or Mojave by chance?
    • tasogare 7y ago
      Yes. I installed Catalina for Sidecar, only to discover the feature wasn’t supported on the 2015 MBP.
      • jsjohnst 7y ago
        Something about Catalina has been causing issues with both installing Xcode and massively increased phantom disk usage (not just related to TimeMachine). I didn’t experience the former (have colleagues who did though), but did experience the later and had it self correct (on a machine without TM enabled).
      • AsyncAwait 7y ago
        Not ideal, but http://dev.zeppel.eu/luca/SidecarCorePatch http://dev.zeppel.eu/luca/SidecarCorePatch might help, apparently it works on the release version too.
        • tasogare 7y ago
          I tried already. The image quality is not worth using the feature.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • walmandurebu 7y ago
• rwmj 7y ago
  My recollection of Linux in year 2000 was it was very easy to understand how everything worked. If you were searching for "terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" then you were definitely doing it wrong (in 2000 and now).
  • stuaxo 7y ago
    Mine, is that my using my soundcard could randomly freeze my machine needing a reset.
    • rwmj 7y ago
      Most likely to be a driver (or even hardware) bug. I had a SB AWE32 card which would do that, and I even hacked on the driver for a while to try to diagnose it before concluding the soundcard was probably taking PCI bus master and never releasing it, not really something that Linux could do anything about. It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.
      • stas2k 7y ago
        Creative was notorious for having chipset-specific PCI bus master issues even on Windows. The only way to fix it was to disable bus master, and that is what Creative drivers did on Windows. On Linux you were expected to be a grown boy and do it yourself in the BIOS.
  • pmlnr 7y ago
    That was ~2008 imo, with 2.6 kernel, way before gtk3, pulseaudio, upstart, etc. although compiz was black magic already.
• akerr 7y ago
  Sure. I was using Linux in 2000 and now I’m using Apple in 2019.
  • yoz-y 7y ago
    Sounds about right. I switched to Mac in 2009 (from linux) and still have not found any reason to go back. I agree that a lot of stuff in the macOS world could be better. But things would have to get a lot worse before switching would make sense.
• jlg23 7y ago
  TL;DR: A user is as frustrated with the Apple experience in 2019 as s/he was in 2000 with Linux. Then that user goes on to rant about some things that frustrate him/her, completely ignoring that one is FOSS and by no means a hardware manufacturer while the other is proprietary and primarily a hardware manufacturer.
  • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    Spot on. The smugness it takes to compare a paid product that spies on you to a gift from [paid and unpaid] volunteers.
    • umanwizard 7y ago
      Do you have any evidence that macOS spies on users?
      • maxhille 7y ago
        Wasn't there just something about Apple sending browsing data to Tencent?
• lelf 7y ago
  > After a ton more googling I believe the author is exaggerating it a little bit. Local time machine snapshots are not arcane secret knowledge (man 8 tmutil).
  • gpvos 7y ago
    You first have to know that something like those snapshots exists, otherwise you won't look at tmutil. The author may not have very good Google-Fu.
• ThalesX 7y ago
  I think though it got upvoted, I’m not sure this piece should be taken so seriously by the commenters. It’s a play on taking some ballpark similiarities and making it seem like Apple 2019 and Linux 2000 are alike. Some might enjoy it, some might not but this is not meant as serious technical piece.
  • s_dev 7y ago
    I'm not remotely convinced by the article. It's clear the author thinks he has clickbait title and just ran an article on it, it's compltely beneath HN, Linux == macOS? Please.
    • ThalesX 7y ago
      I agree, it's somewhat below the standard, but then again, we decide the standard together.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • monsieurbanana 7y ago
    Trying to write a non-serious article doesn't give you a free pass to say things like "[linux] fanboys are condescending elitist computer nerds" or that "[Apple] fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers". Not that it's illegal, but he shouldn't be surprised if people just dismiss him whatever message he's trying to send just because he seems insufferable.
    • ThalesX 7y ago
      This is not a discussion I intend to extend, especially in the context of this silly article. I will say that you can write whatever the hell you want on the internet and the reach you'll get will probably be the free pass or not, it's not for you or me to decide. He can say whatever he wants, people can upvote whatever they want, commenters can comment whatever they want. I'm just trying to justify a viewpoint you could be taking when interacting with this article...
• mrtksn 7y ago
  Yes but no because it is 2019. It's simply a list of things that Linux sucked at and Apple is now dropping support as it no longer matters or things that affect a very small number of its users. I remember when I tried to use Linux as my desktop operating system because it was up and coming to destroy Windows. >External monitors I don't know how you can have a problem with that. I have a 10gbp dongle from Amazon with HDMA, DVI and VGA output and works with no configuration. On Linux, I had to do some hacky stuff on the terminal to get a monitor to somewhat work(wouldn't turn off, would come back from sleep mode etc.) >Software installation I don't feel any pressure to use Mac Appstore, in fact, I never use Mac Appstore. I also, in fact, know that people don't actually use Mac Appstore because here are many stories about Mac Appstore being useless for developers >Hardware compatibility The given example is an Android phone. That's nothing like the given example of not being able to use your graphics card on Linux. The Android phone is not an integral part of the Mac user experience, it is a separate computer that you may choose not to use if that computer's vendors are not providing decent support. >Technical support I would agree that Apple lacks on the phone support but Mac power users are much more polite on the internet than the grumpy Linux gurus out there that will not hesitate you to tell you how stupid you are for not being able to solve that basic problem. Also, there are Apple stores where you can hand over your computer and get it fixed. >Advocate behaviour Oh god, this is no comparison. Lunux power users are the worst. They are out there to get you down, they are angry, unfriendly and arrogant. They are on a mission. Maybe they should seek help just as Linux Trovalds.
  • braindeath 7y ago
    Right. Because external monitors and installing software are things no longer relevant in 2019.
    • mrtksn 7y ago
      Plugging a dongle or clicking on a DMG file and dragging an icon is no comparison to fiddling in the terminal following precise commands where mistakes can brick your machine.
• thrower123 7y ago
  Linux was something you downloaded for $0 and half the fun was tinkering on it. Apple is a proprietary product that you pay a hefty premium compared to other available options for. It's getting to the point where even the most full-throated Apple advocates have to admit that things are not going in the right direction, and normies are starting to bitch and moan about their Macbooks more than Windows laptops that cost half to a quarter. They really need to focus on quality, if they want to remain a viable platform.
  • noah-kun 7y ago
    Apple laptops are incredibly good. But I did notice, switching to a 2012 temporarily, that I only missed like... half a dozen things. It was half the speed, twice the mass, but it got the job done shockingly well. I hated the old hinge trackpad, and the keys weren't to my liking. A few apps (mostly iPad ports) had typography that was hard to read on a non-Retina display. I switched back to the 2018 and yes it was a huge relief, but I could have switched back to my 2018 model 3 or 4 days ago and that says something.
• threeseed 7y ago
  1. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party monitors are an extremely common combination. 2. I just downloaded Caret (Markdown editor) from their website and used Homebrew to install a CLI tool. Nothing has changed between the current OSX and previous ones. 3. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with them 1-1. Very rare to find anything that someone in the store doesn't know. 4. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports. 5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
  • foldr 7y ago
    >MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports. I agree with what you're saying, but as a pedantic factual correction, the 13" MacBook Pro has two.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    Apple support has always been great in my experience. They’re worth the money.
    • guacjack 7y ago
      Totally agree, a few years ago I had a 2015 27inch iMac with AppleCare which ended up getting a smudge under the display. Apple repaired it no problem. About a year later, the stand became a little loose so over the course of the day it would end up tilting down. Apple sympathised this was the 2nd time I had to send it in for a repair, they ended replacing with a similar specced iMac from the current year. They also give me the opportunity to upgrade any components I wanted just like if I was buying new. They also give me another 3 years of Apple Care. Ended up upgrading the CPU and GPU for about £300 and getting a brand new 2018 iMac Obviously this is anecdotal but its things like this which keep me going back to Apple.
      • 7y ago
• ratsimihah 7y ago
  > Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model. Glad I'm not the only one having issues getting my non-antialiased fonts to render properly on external monitors. Crossing fingers for 2020.
  • unicornfinder 7y ago
    A semi-related issue I've had as well is macOS has a tendency to try and use the wrong colour space for HDMI monitors, causing everything to appear purple.
  • bloke_zero 7y ago
    Mine was flickering on a Dell external monitor. It didn't happen so much if you had it as the main monitor (i.e. the one the tab-application switcher appeared on). Other wise it would constantly go into power saving mode and then come back on - works fine with Debian!
    • ratsimihah 7y ago
      I guess it shows how proprietary software/hardware hinders speed of development.
• song 7y ago
  I do believe that macos is not as stable, performant or well thought out as it used to be. There are also a few recurring bugs that really annoy me (search not working in Apple Mail forcing me to reindex for example) But, I think this article is over the top... I've never had issues with external monitors (nor know anyone who had some), I never use the App store (I oppose it on principle) and when I've had a non standard issue with my mac, the technician proved knowledgeable and quickly figured I did know what I was doing so didn't baby talk me. It turned out to be a hardware problem but I was impressed with how well they diagnosed it.
  • WilliamEdward 7y ago
    This has happened to me: my external monitor created harmonic interference with its electrical frequency and literally prevented wifi from reaching my mac. It's something i never thought possible but here we are; not saying this is mac's fault but monitor issues are not uncommon and this definitely didn't happen with windows.
  • mplanchard 7y ago
    FWIW, my new MacBook using an external dock and USB-C to display port has insane problems. I have to unplug and plug back in at least once per day, and even worse, sometimes after sleep the monitor will work, but typing and clicking will be laggy, which I am sometimes able to resolve only by unplugging the monitor and plugging back in, but other times it requires a restart.
  • Mindwipe 7y ago
    Specifically the USB-C to HDMI dongle for the Macbook seems to be totally useless. It has terrible reviews, is one of the only Apple products I've ever seen that required multiple full machine reboots to install a driver, and is just completely unreliable. We'll see if the new version is any better, but I'm not hopeful given either Apple doesn't seem to really know what devices are supposed to be able to play 4K iTunes content or may have just silently pulled the feature at the last minute and not told anyone.
• jcbrand 7y ago
  Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad. This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well. Also, IIRC "alien" already existed in 2000, letting you install packages packaged for other distros (e.g. installing rpm on Debian). Linux 2000: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Asking friends for assistance does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit. My recollection is that in 2000 people were less prone to just do a websearch and then give up when no relevant results are returned. People would ask in IRC or mailing lists. Hell, in 2001 I had Linux on my home machine and I didn't have an internet connection at all. The only way to get things to work was to rely on friends and to figure stuff out for myself. It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    > This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well. And you can still do this on macOS too!
  • milankragujevic 7y ago
    > It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow. Excuse me but that is definitely not what someone should be doing unless they don't have any actual work to do and instead can use all their time to play with Linux distro configurations. It is unacceptable to have to resort to spending days or weeks on a problem. That is an absolute show stopper for almost everyone. You can "defend" Linux with the fact that it is a open source project that is maintained and improved by people in their free time, and that is absolutely okay and acceptable. But you can't then complain why hasn't Linux taken over the desktop. Why? Because, unlike on servers where the only person responsible for it is a "guru", everyone uses a PC and expects it to work and let them use it to accomplish work or entertain themselves. If Linux cannot do that, people won't use it, no matter the [whether subjective or objective] freedom-restrictions, dark patterns, privacy violations and outright illegal activity of Microsoft, or the [subjectively?] overpriced Apple ecosystem. edit: Also, I'd like to add that I use Ubuntu exclusively at home and have a super-paranoid-level network firewall setup that blocks and monitors all traffic, and use AOSP on my phone with only blobs for GPU, SoC initialization and the magic black box that is the baseband processor. I use Ubuntu because it works for me better and more often than Windows, but I am a geek and I know things that my parents don't. Okay bad example they also use Linux that I forced on them to be able to remotely administer it. But in any case people use what works for them best. I cannot afford an update that gets stuck on Getting things ready... and risk shutting down the PC and having it do a mandatory recovery or rollback procedure. Linux breaks less often for me because I pick my hardware and software and set it up. But nobody can expect that of people and they shouldn't have to. Death by a thousand paper cuts and rough edges and all.
• least 7y ago
  In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years? > External Monitors Plugging in monitors in linux today frequently does not behave as you expect. The chances of errant behavior is significantly higher on linux than any other operating system. I can't speak to apple computers not working with projectors, but it seems like he's comparing apples to oranges here. > Software Installation The "One True Way" of installing software is still the case in linux. Installing outside of the native package manager's repositories is discouraged. Installing of any software on mac is 'discouraged' in that you need to authorize just about every installation you do on the app store. Homebrew does not require sudo to install applications, though GUI applications will generally still need an okay from the user to open and use. The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still encouraged to install executables downloaded on the internet. > Hardware comaptibility Linux and MacOS both bake hardware compatibility into the kernel. You will still run into weird cases where a display port out on your graphics card won't work with linux for some indiscernible reason. This is admittedly significantly better than it was in 2000, however. > Laptop features Linux didn't have dedicated laptops in 2000. The fact that they lacked USB ports has nothing to do with Linux. Current macbook pros have 4 usb ports (other than entry level mbp 13). Retina macbook pros had 2. I'm certain he's talking about usb-a ports, however. This isn't unique to Apple laptops, however. Most PC laptops manufactured today lack more than 2 usb type a ports. It's very difficult to find. > Advocate behavior It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.
  • proverbialbunny 7y ago
    >In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years? I'm not sure what hardware you're using. On my end Linux so stable I haven't had a crash in years. Though, I have had some Firefox updates not render sites correctly. That and the default desktop behavior isn't ideal. Setting Force Full Composition Pipeline makes everything run as smooth as butter, similar to how OSX feels. It really should be the default behavior. All in all, Linux is far more stable and usable as a desktop today.
• dschuetz 7y ago
  No, it's not. Most prominently Apple costs thousands, Linux is a community driven kernel and software distributions on top of it, which commonly are free of charge. From that perspective his comparisons are nil. Linux doesn't make computers that have problems. Apple has its own closed ecosystem of hardware and software, Linux is Open Source Software. To say that modern Apple systems are just as bad as Linux systems 20 years ago is making Linux look bad, it's an unfair comparison. Remember Apple 20 years ago? It was even worse than today!
• noah-kun 7y ago
  I have run into the storage problem a number of times, yeah. Once there was a `.Trash` file in some hard-to-access place that needed deleting. And if your Time Machine backups are failing, they can create a big cache somewhere mysterious in the file system. I have told Time Machine to ignore docker files as well, not sure if it helped in every case. In one case I deleted all my node_modules folders, and Time Machine backup succeeded and macOS deleted it's prepared backup files, freeing up tonnes of space. We'll see if it occurs again with Catalina. All the other stuff is almost entirely wrong, in my experience.
• saagarjha 7y ago
  > It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. It’s not completely obvious, but when you delete something it doesn’t disappear immediately because your Mac will keep it around on a local Time Machine snapshot so that it can keep decent history even if you’re away from your backup drive for a bit. And even if this wasn’t the case, with APFS copy-on-write deleting a file won’t necessarily free up space on your filesystem if there’s another copy hanging around.
• thinkingemote 7y ago
  Good post on hiw to annoy two large groups of hacker news readers, Linux advocates and Apple enthusiasts.
  • mrtksn 7y ago
    I have to say that I was outraged and reminded how much I hate the culture of machine maintenance glorification culture popular among the Linux people. Top-notch trolling.
• pmlnr 7y ago
  /me gets popcorn out Apple people will be outraged about this post, even if it's mostly a joke. My conclusion from it is that there are difficult topics, and, apparently, changing standards fast is not helping at all. (DisplayPort was finally more or less working, but sure, swap to another display outlet... and the same for a lot of things). There is no time to build systems (hw or sw, or god forbid, the two together) that are _mainly_ bug free with common hardware. Windows XP in it's final days was close to this. The most stable desktop linux distribution I used was a short lived Linux Mint release, 10 (Julia), which doesn't make any sense. Maybe if standards we slowed down a bit and we'd give more time to sand the rough edges tech history wouldn't constantly run in circles. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • proverbialbunny 7y ago
    Why was Mint Julia more stable for you? On my end on the up-to-date version and it's perfectly stable on my hardware. (i5 /w a modern nvidia gfx card)
  • SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Idk, macs are pretty close to worry-free hardware interactions. It’s a plug and forget system. Maybe windows is too by now.
• rasfincher 7y ago
  Too many of the issues the author cites about Linux are still problems today. They're not nearly as bad as they were in 2000, but they still exist.
  • jamil7 7y ago
    Exactly, especially regarding multi monitor support.
• beokop 7y ago
  I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is extremely flakey. A small excerpt from my personal list of woes: - Using a USB-c <-> DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp. - Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the dongle’s USB-A interface directly. - Sometimes the Touch Bar goes completely unresponsive for ~10s. Sometimes, after a reboot or after waking from sleep, it just doesn’t start at all. - At one point the speakers started blasting white noise at the loudest volume for no apparent reason. Closed the lid, opened it, same thing. Rebooted the machine and never encountered that problem again. - If a certain kind of network error occurs when setting up Time Machine then System Preferences will hang completely for ~5 minutes. In many ways the experience is what I would expect if I could run Linux on this machine: Hardware kind of works with lots of random bugs.
  • mjlee 7y ago
    For your first problem, perhaps some monitor auto detection has gone crazy with a colour profile. Have a look under System Preferences -> Displays -> Colour (you need to have the monitor plugged in to tweak it.)
    • beokop 7y ago
      Thanks for the tip. I’ve tried that before, without success, but someone else reading this might have better luck. For what it’s worth this happens both with a 15” and a 13” MBP from different years.
      • mjlee 7y ago
        Maybe one of the pins in the DVI connector is dodgy? Have you tried another connector/DVI cable/DVI source to rule out the display? I know you said it didn't happen in bootcamp but perhaps there's some deep magic happening.
• sgjohnson 7y ago
  Why did this even get upvoted? Every point is factually incorrect.
  • rf15 7y ago
    Because it is a humourous interpretation of the problems of the latest MacOS update and general imperfections of the platform. Humour is not a lost art, and please accept the fact that the update wasn't smooth sailing for many people. Maybe not the majority, but many.
• milankragujevic 7y ago
  Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it... This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted years ago. Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was worse than now. Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things explained. In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz cubes... It just became better, and it keeps getting better.
  • afiori 7y ago
    Until 2014-15 it was my understanding that the approved way was to reinstall the OS every 6-7 months. Things would slowly stop working with drivers and software installations... (I briefly switched to Fedora, which is now my most long-lived linux install at 3-4 years, I gather that also debian and ubuntu got better over time)
• dilap 7y ago
  I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now, but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your config + problems, there's gunna be a bunch of other people running the exact same config, w/ the exact same problems. Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved. (Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately, since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.) With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_ had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow grease. I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty" stage of software, I think.
• coldtea 7y ago
  Sorry, the article is BS. > Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work." Yeah, no. > Software installation That was not true for Linux in 2000 (alas, I know, I had to manually compile tarballs for all kinds of stuff, and download binaries of others), and is not true for macOS in 2019. Notarization != the app store. >Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Yeah, no.
  • AsyncAwait 7y ago
    I definitely had problems with external monitors, (not even projectors), being either blurry, using the wrong color profile or not being recognized until some time after I log in, so "Yeah, no" might be the answer you wish was true, but isn't.
• Grustaf 7y ago
  Even if this is true, there’s a crucial difference: 90% of what you want to do in MacOS is very simple and works, on 2000 Linux nothing was simple at all. I know because I only used Linux back then.
  • AsyncAwait 7y ago
    By around mid-2000s, Mandrake made things reasonably easy, so maybe the headline is a bit too eager in the comparison, but not that far off.
  • diffeomorphism 7y ago
    Analogy is not perfect therefore I am going to ignore everything you wrote?
    • Grustaf 7y ago
      No, but if you compare two case: Mac: 90% is easy and works, 10% is really hard Linux: 90% is hard, 10% is really hard I don’t think that focusing on the really hard 10% is very fair.
• ryuukk_ 7y ago
  lol, Linux of 2019 is Linux of 2000, still broken
• proverbialbunny 7y ago
  I've been on MacOS since 5 (mac classic). I went to Win 2000 and XP for a while but came back at 10.3. On average every 2 years I'd pick up a few distros of Linux, play with it, then drop it and go back to OS X. This continued until recently. This last year I've been on Linux for the first time. Specifically, Linux Mint. OS X hasn't been going in a direction I strongly care for (10.6 was my favorite, as well as Windows 2000). I'm a power user who just wants things to work. I don't need all the bells and whistles. I want a low maintenance experience without bugs, that just works. Right now Linux Mint is that on my hardware. The only modification I've done to the system is using the graphics card for v-sync instead of the cpu. Outside of that, I'm on a 4k monitor that works at 60fps. I've not had a single crash or noticeable bug since installing (except a bug in Firefox). I haven't had to go deep in the terminal, but I have built custom versions of software. eg, the version of cmake on the OS is older than the version needed to build cuda projects that use cmake. It's a minimum no bells and whistles it just works experience. So I'm happy. Is it for everyone? No. Are more every day desktop users going to be picking up Linux in the near future? Probably. Video game support has gotten so good on Linux that people who play video games have been slowly jumping ship. I've been surprised. Though, if they break anything, I'll go back to OSX.
  • lzol 7y ago
    Mint is such a wonderful distro for people who want to use Linux but don't want to mess with things. I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far. Canonical really dropped the ball with how great a no-config, no-bullshit distro can be. Ubuntu felt like it was on this path 10 years ago before they started adding all the unnecessary bullshit. I'm glad Mint is the fork that picked up the slack.
    • rochak 7y ago
      I agree. Mint has been my daily driver ever since Ubuntu dropped the ball.
    • proverbialbunny 7y ago
      >I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far. Thanks for the kind words. ^_^ I might be unusual, but I never cared for Ubuntu, even when everyone was raving about it. I like to minimize whitespace. While my monitor is decently sized, too many distros have a horizontal bar on the top and the bottom of the screen. It feels like wasted space. Mint doesn't do that, and it's professional looking. It's dark theme looks and feels great too.
• bitL 7y ago
  On a MacBook with Catalina I can't update XCode at all; it downloads ~4GB then resets the progress and starts re-downloading until it reaches 100% where it resets progress again and repeats.
  • stefano 7y ago
    I had the same problem. I ended up downloading the xip archive from the developers center and installing that, bypassing the app store.
• 40four 7y ago
  Brace yourself for an infinite stream of angry 'fanboys' (or girls :p), who will point by point, try to dismantle this 'agrument' Or in other words... cant take a joke!
• esotericn 7y ago
  Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's closed source. The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on getting better, and better, and better. There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is stopping you. By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and make it wanky in some way you're SOL. It honestly boggles my mind that professional software developers tolerate that kind of stuff. I guess if you're a web dev or you're 20 years deep into a career in a specific stack the benefits outweigh the costs. I'm probably coming up on 15 years of *nix now. I do look back sometimes. It's universally terrible.
  • yawgmoth 7y ago
    Earlier this year I purchased a fairly pricey Asus laptop. A few months in the wireless card appeared to commit seppuku so I reinstalled the drivers, no dice, reinstalled windows, no dice and now my touchpad was broken. Every driver failed to affect any device, so I installed the latest Ubuntu and it all 'just worked', including the keyboard backlight. When I explained this to ASUS support they said the hardware must be faulty and my only option is to send the laptop in. That is ostensibly not true as Ubuntu can't magically repair hardware failures. Meanwhile my other Windows box restarts every night, but fails to apply updates, so every time I use it I am greeted with that failure and no insight or path to success.
    • dheelus 7y ago
      I had this happen to my Dell XPS 15 about 2 years back. It was a year old at the time so still under warranty. Dell said it was a hardware failure and I had to return it. IT issued me a new Precision 5520 that has worked really well since.
    • gimboland 7y ago
      "Ostensibly" doesn't mean what you think it means here.
  • bluegreyred 7y ago
    As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a separate computer? These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I won't discover until I make the switch) are the main reasons holding me back at the moment. The lack of interoperability because Linux is not an established consumer OS (yet).
• youdontknowtho 7y ago
  I know what this guy is trying to say about Apple, but it should be said that Linux isn't that way any more. Really the last time I installed a Linux distro on a laptop it went wonderfully. I'm not even a Linux fan boy. I'm also not usually complimentary about things like this that should just be the norm. All that said, client side Linux is so much better than it used to be. It's a dramatic improvement.
• fouc 7y ago
  Everyone knows this is a nice juicy troll blog post.. not meant to be taken 100% seriously. Right? :)
• makz 7y ago
  I can do a lot more stuff on macOS on 2019 than on any linux distro in 2000.
• reallydontask 7y ago
  I guess this is one way of inflaming 5/6 of Hacker News.
• spodek 7y ago
  GNU/Linux is distributed under the GPL and other Free licenses. Apple is proprietary. Other differences stem from this difference or are cosmetic. Until Apple releases all its software under Free licenses, the adversarial parts of its relationship with its users will hold it back.
• davidgrenier 7y ago
  I must be really bad at this because to me this is the linux of today.
• webjac 7y ago
  Apple 2019: Siri remind me to call mom when I get home Linux 2000: … Apple 2019: Use my iPad as a secondary screen wirelessly Linux 2000: … Apple 2019: AirPlay to my TV this content Linux 2000: … Apple 2019: Sync my contacts, notes, calendars, wirelessly with all my devices Linux 2000: … Can we stop being ridiculous now or do I have to keep lowering myslef to the stupidity of the writer of this?
  • yboris 7y ago
    Look up "charitable interpretation" or "Principle of charity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity Basically -- don't assume the person is stupid, figure out a way to interpret it better. Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than admitting that such flaws exist.
    • chooseaname 7y ago
      > Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than admitting that such flaws exist. It's like the people on Reddit ios/apple/mac subs who run iOS 13 or Catalina betas and claim they haven't experienced a single bug. I don't understand that mentality. One, you're defending a corporation. Two, even if they make your favorite devices/software, it's OK to say something negative.
  • cellularmitosis 7y ago
    Your comment was great up until that ad hominem in the last line.
  • NullPrefix 7y ago
    > Apple 2019: Use my iPad as a secondary screen wirelessly Linux 2000: … When was VNC first released? Sure, wasn't available on iPad .. because iPad was not available yet. >Apple 2019: Sync my contacts, notes, calendars, wirelessly with all my devices Linux 2000: … You keep repeating that word, wirelessly. Are you trying to make a point that rsync over ethernet does not count? This all sounds like a bunch of buzzwords and proprietary gimmicks when standard solution was already available. That standard solution may needed some work, but the basic functionality was there.
• wyclif 7y ago
  I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space I think he meant 'incantation'.
• jussij 7y ago
  > it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer. So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again. This sounds like the Samsung phone I purchased new some 5+ years ago. This brand new phone never managed to do an update in all that time. It would always insist a new update was available but on every attempt it would fail with some vague recourse issue. It would even ask for permission to send details of the failed attempt back to home base. After a dozen of failed attempts, a dozen approvals for feedback requests, the purchase of addition SIM memory cards to give it more memory in the hope the update would work, the online thing that did work was to just take the phone offline (data offline) and ignore the update request. Now this was never a top end phone (less than $300 some 5+ years ago) but what was amazing is how bad this new phone from day one would continually insist an update was required, with each an every update failing to install.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bytebuster 7y ago
  This is so shallow it feels like it was written just to create buzz. It's so easy to build a shallow and polarized list like this about ANYTHING. All I can take from this article is that this guy doesn't seem to be good at argumentation. 2/10 on Apple whining. Here, take your buzz.
• jasoneckert 7y ago
  Thanks for posting this! Some funny parallels in a humorous blog post is a great way to start any Monday! Yes, I can read from the comments that it rubbed people the wrong way - but lighten up! I did a satirical piece on Apple earlier this year, but had to remind readers not to get their feathers ruffled beforehand: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2/2_Cult_of_Mac_eBook.html https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Annatar 7y ago
  "Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad." That is absolutely correct and if one is installing software in any other way than packaging it into an OS package, one is hacking in the worst possible, amateurish way, with the added bonus that every experienced UNIX system administrator will hate one's guts come time to automate the installation of one's software. It's enough to make my blood boil and suddenly get violent and I don't even work as a system administrator. This is not an issue specific to Linux, it's one quarter laziness, one quarter ignorance, one quarter incompetence and one quarter amateurism: if, as a programmer, one considers a programming tool like OS packaging too hard or too complicated, one is truly in the wrong profession.
  • cyberpunk 7y ago
    So all those sysadmins installing oracle rdbms, websphere stuff or basically any other kind of enterprise software in the last 10 years are in the wrong profession? I'd best tell them...
    • Annatar 7y ago
      There are a lot of people in that subprofession which have no business being there. Go to any larger non-Silicon Valley enterprise and the first thing you'll run into are system engineering departments doing work Oracle should have done 40 years ago -- system engineering OS packages out of Oracle's products. Oracle RDBMS is the #1 product Oracle's customers have a system engineering department for; it's just yet another blight on that company's long list of screw-ups.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    People like you are the reason Linux is not and will likely never be a good Desktop OS. It should not require an army of maintainers, repos, and all that bullshit just to get software from developer to user. Thankfully there is AppImage. Now if only more developers would distribute that way.
    • 7y ago
• nkoren 7y ago
  Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn't work. Eventually, give up. Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs. I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs are regressing, but the grass isn't greener on either side. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
  • darrmit 7y ago
    I came here to say the same. I do have more issues with macOS than I did, say, 5 years ago. However, the constant Windows update cycle is a nightmare and Linux still can't seem to get battery life and things like Bluetooth (audio inputs, etc.) quite right, so I'm left with hoping that Apple gets their stuff back together. Operating system stability just seems to have declined in general in the last 3-5 years.
    • computerex 7y ago
      Have you tried using tlp/powertop? I'd say my battery life is pretty comparable to Windows after having done some optimizations using aforementioned tools.
      • darrmit 7y ago
        I have not, but will check it out. My problem is I love the idea of being able to tinker and get to a super stable, lovable mobile Linux setup, but I just don't have time right now. Maybe someday. :)
        • 7y ago
• cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  With the rise of mobile predominance, innovation on desktop platforms has essentially stalled. Consumers don't really care.
• radres 7y ago
  Are you telling me Apple is gonna grow 100x in 10 years? shit!
• te_chris 7y ago
  I just came here to say that lattes haven't been cool for a very long time. Offtopic, yes, but about the most substantial allegation made in the post.
• mvaliente2001 7y ago
  In my experience, when we talk about software (hardware issues are always a thing on less used systems) Linux is the less black-box of these three OSes. If you have a non trivial problem with Windows or OSX OSes or apps, you're out of luck. With Linux, you have the tools to reach the root causes. Or at least, that used to be the case. New apps in Linux (particularly in Ubuntu) want to be as "friendly" as Windows or OSX, so they hide how things works, and put layer over layer of abstraction to the point where nothing is obvious anymore.
• csomar 7y ago
  > Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model. I just setup a new Macbook Pro with Catalina (one day ago). Plugged three monitors. (Adapters were cheap knock-off from China). And it worked fine. > Apple 2019: There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad. I'd say the state of OSX is much better than Linux. Apple doesn't favor the Apple store as far as I'm aware but just signing apps. Apps in MacOS are simpler. They are a "single" file bundle (but the bundle is mostly non-exposed to the user). Uninstall is also simpler: you just remove the file from your applications folder. In the longer run, this should make you trust your applications more although signed by apple doesn't mean it's not going to harm your setup. This might prevent average users from installing apps but more sophisticated ones will just go around it. > Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Things either don't work at all, have reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then for no discernible reason. I already have the whole laptop working from the get-go. That's already an advantage over Linux. I have my old printer working. Ledger worked out of the box with no drivers setup. Maybe I'm in the minority. > Apple 2019: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports. Macbook Pros come with 4 usb-c ports. That's more than enough considering that you can run multiple things on parallel on a single usb-c port. > Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers. Stop talking to retarded people. Your quality of life will increase considerably.
• ubermonkey 7y ago
  Wow, this article is bad -- like, literally WRONG on nearly every boldfaced point. 1. "External monitors don't work". Wrong. I present often, and frequently use hotel projectors or monitors. I've never had a problem connecting to a monitor. 2. "You can only install software from the App Store". Wrong. Software installation is simple. Sure, you can use the App Store, but you absolutely do not have to. 3. "Only a limited number of hardware works out of the box". I have yet to run into a hardware compatibility problem. I use non-Apple keyboards and non-Apple mice, non-Apple cameras, non-Apple mass storage, Sennheiser headset, etc. 4. Tech support with Apple is better than I've had with any other major tech vendor, including Dell -- where we pay out the wazoo for supposedly gold-plated support -- with only one actual problem: Apple doesn't sell the 'we fix it RIGHT NOW' plan Dell offers. (Of course, Dell tends not to actually meet this promise, so ...) 5. "It is very difficult to find a laptop with more than 2 USB ports." Wrong. Apparently the author didn't look very hard, because the 15" Macbook Pro has 4 USB-C ports. Here, he seems to be mad that the other two models -- marketed as compact and slim over powerful -- have made more tradeoffs to be small than the 15". So yeah, forgive me if I don't take his comments terribly seriously. It's not that there aren't some very legitimate criticisms to be made about Cupertino, even if you don't take a position on proprietary software. There definitely are. But absolutely none of these are valid. However, I'm absolutely certain that the Apple-hating contingent on HN will eat it up with a spoon. :(
  • diffeomorphism 7y ago
    1. "Works for me" is not an argument. 2. Not the argument made. 3. "Works for me" is not an argument. 4. Not the argument made.
    • ubermonkey 7y ago
      As predicted, the anti-Apple contingent, and right on time -- and with exactly the sort of paper-thin rebuttal I was expecting, too. 1. The argument he made was "plugging an external projector will most likely not work." All that is necessary to disprove this is to show examples where it does work. I do that all the time, in a variety of locations with a variety of ages and brands of projectors and monitors, and never see an issue, it seems that pointing out my experience is relevant. The author has made a blanket and unsupportable statement easily disproved with one counterexample, so there's not a lot that needs to be done here. 2. In point of fact, the author made NO argument. His (erroneous) complaint is "there is only one true way," but this is also easily disproved with a cursory survey of major vendors, nearly all of whom provide direct-download installers today just as they have done for 20+ years. 3. See #1. "only a small number of things work" is not an argument, either. He can claim this, but it's not true; as many, many other folks have pointed out, Mac hardware is broadly compatible with peripherals from a wide range of makers. In 20+ years of using Mac laptops, I've never had a problem with a peripheral not working. 4. Yeah, it is. Tech support with Apple, by phone or in person, is far superior than the support you'll get from any major hardware vendor without purchasing a pricey service plan, and probably better than you'll get even if you do. That the author contends it's no better than random Googling means either s/he didn't try Apple support, or that s/he is fantastically inexperienced with (e.g.) Dell or HP service.
• bsg75 7y ago
  A critical difference is that Linux circa 2000 was on a path of improvement. macOS 2019 seems to be sacrificing usability for those of us that frequent HN, in an attempt to be more useful for the iPad crowd.
  • ubermonkey 7y ago
    In what way?
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  Don't ever let anyone tell you HN is only for insightful, interesting articles. Keep those nerdbaiting shitposts comin'! #spicytake
• brookhaven_dude 7y ago
  What's a good replacement for icloud keychain? Something that will fill passwords on my iPhone?
  • rhodysurf 7y ago
    1password
• devsmt 7y ago
  entertaining and well written.
• Razengan 7y ago
  macOS is still light years better than subjecting yourself to Windows or Linux and the Escheresque nightmare they call a GUI. Maybe once they have figured out how to scale for high-DPI displays without looking like something stretched up in Deluxe Paint*, I might tolerate giving them a second glance. (Not a jab at DP, it was the bomb and I miss it dearly.)
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• sascha_sl 7y ago
  That's a really low effort wide brush no subtlety post, why does this have ~340 points again?
• SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Can’t we just admit all three major OS’s suck badly for various reasons? Why do we need to pick winners when they all have major usability issues? * Apple and Microsoft don’t care about your needs at all and provide no route to changing or fixing the software you use. If you aren’t a large corporation you’re nobody. They will NEVER ask your needs but tell you them. * BSD/Linux with X11 is still working to catch up with basic Windows usability and may already be a suitable replacement for you, but if you want changes they will take years for the community to invest in. * There are no other options for getting work done.
• mcv 7y ago
  I guess what I really want to know is: is there a 2019 Linux distro which is the Mac OS of 2011? One where stuff just works, looks good, and works smoothly.
  • zucker42 7y ago
    Either Mint, or Arch with i3, or Ubuntu, or Manjaro with xfce, or Fedora with KDE, or Elementary depending on who you ask.
• epx 7y ago
  Had to free space with tmutils for XCode 11 as well. TBH it is a rather anemic machine (Air with 128GB SSD).
• ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  I enjoyed that. Thanks! Well, I've hitched my wagon to the Apple packtrain, so I'm in for the ride. I know a number of folks that work for Apple, and have confidence that they will get their stuff together, sooner or later. I'm not sure they have managed the transition from "brink of failure upstart" to "big ol' blue chip" too well.
• acoye 7y ago
  … without the openness. Soon RIP OpenCL, and OGL. Also non existing bare metal Vulkan kext. (I know about moltenVK … but this is 3rd party metal wrapper)
• Philipp__ 7y ago
  I see a lot of people here bitchin about bad Linux desktop experience and they I see they were all using Gnome. Just give KDE a try people. It is very light, clean NixOS KDE5 installation consumed 450MBs of RAM.
• alwillis 7y ago
  By default, files that you delete, even after emptying the Trash, stick around for 30 days, incase you change your mind. You can change that behavior if you want or you can delete the files by: 1. Select About this Mac from the Apple menu 2. Click on the Storage tab 3. Click on the Manage… button 4. Click on the Trash icon You can now delete the files permanently.
• kokey 7y ago
  I suppose having problems with external monitors makes it like Linux, since if you want to support monitor hardware on your immutable headless Linux server instance deployed in the cloud you are doing something wrong.
• skarap 7y ago
  > Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best. Depends on whom you ask. There are people who use it exactly because when "things break at random" they absolutely can understand the reasons and actually fix it in contrast to some other OSes (or Linux from more recent years).
• mfer 7y ago
  There are some call outs in this worth talking about... > Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Is the Android issue on Apple or on Google. Each is very much into ecosystem lock-in. Who is failing to write the integration software? IMHO, it would be far better for consumers if these things were like plumbing or electrical. You can mix and match from different manufacturers because of standard sizes and interfaces. > Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit. How much of this is UX and expectations. I imagine the person writing this isn't an average consumer. Is the expectation someone who can do level 4 tech support rather than the tech support reps on the front lines? Those front line people trained to handle general consumers rather than people who read HN.
• ulises314 7y ago
  This looks a little unfair to 2000's Linux fanboys (which of course included me): The well maintained, comprehensive, tested list of software, mirrors and checksums that Debian had and inspired other distros to emulate were a godsend compared to downloading a code tar file and hunt dependencies manually (when not modifying code yourself), you were always free to use other channels, but other channels were just usually worst; all other points seem to have similar nuances, from a user point of view situation is similar but is actually a real problem out of scope of developers (Linux) vs. Apple just being jerks.
• mikestew 7y ago
  Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Is this true? Because I'll tell you a story about my early days of using Mac OS. We've all sat in meetings waiting for someone to do the Fn-F5/Ctrl-Alt-F3 dance trying to get the laptop to output to the projector. I had to do a presentation, and using Mac OS for the first to do so. "Oh, shoot, I don't even know the keyboard dance to do to hook it up. Meh, plug it in, figure it out in a minute." Plugged it in and...it just worked(tm). As soon as cable touched plug, it output to the projector. Fuckin'-A. And here's the kicker: Mac OS was running on a Hackintosh, not real Apple hardware. That right there was enough to sell me on Mac OS. I don't connect to random external monitors much anymore, but I've never had a problem getting output to any random display I've hooked a Mac to.
  • ubermonkey 7y ago
    It's not true. I've traveled & presented with Mac laptops for 20 years, and never had a problem.
• bluedino 7y ago
  Mac user since 2010. At the time the laptop hardware was just so far ahead of anything else when it came to battery life and sleekness. I still like it for general use (web, development, terminal stuff). But the hardware is driving me away. Un-repairable, expensive, non-upgradeable, failure-prone... I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro with a fan that gets annoying clickity/clackity, $500 repair from the Apple store. No thanks I will live with it. One of my biggest pet peeves with MacOS is that even though it's so nice to use, it's just so damn slow. Everything is slow. When I user a lesser Windows 10 or Ubuntu machine, it feels like a rocket. The only thing that feels fast on a Mac is Safari.
• sarah180 7y ago
  Is this satire of the ridiculous false equivalencies so often employed in modern rhetoric? Does the author really think using a Mac in 2019 is a complicated and fiddly as using a Linux machine in 2000? Or are people just upvoting something because it's the kind of lazy hot take that's candy for socially ranked sites like this? This is why I believe sites like HN and Reddit often make their readers dumber despite surfacing good information.
  • Razengan 7y ago
    Whenever something gets upvoted very fast in a manner that doesn't seem consistent with a site's regular usage, suspect that it's botted/been paid for by rival companies. Anything getting 300+ points in 3 hours is rarely organic. There's almost nothing else currently on the front page with this kind of votes/time ratio, besides the post about Google banning accounts.
  • lowan12 7y ago
    In one sentence you show that you are aware of the piece's satire, and in the next you question whether the author truly believes everything he says? I think it's pretty obvious that the article was not meant to be taken completely seriously and is poking humour at some "familiar" experiences.
• hota_mazi 7y ago
  As a JVM developer, to me, Windows became a superior developer operating system to both MacOS and Linux about five years ago. I still use both Windows and MacOS on a daily basis and dislike my MacOS time more and more each day, due to a mix of hardware reasons and software issues like the ones described in that article.
• g105b 7y ago
  The sad truth is simply that all software sucks.
• folkhack 7y ago
  There were so many bits of this that I found weird but this one stood out: > Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad. I was in my "dating phase" of testing Linux distros out as a kid in those days, and I never felt "bad" building something from source when not available from aptitude (or portage, or whatever)...? I feel like being able to build one-off software has always been part of the ethos of Linux due to the whole "freedom" aspect and all =/
• IsNullAValue 7y ago
  "Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers." - sounds much like the Sonos discussion forum.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  Does this mean we've passed Peak Computer?
• _bxg1 7y ago
  > This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s. In my experience (I have personal machines running all three OSes), macOS has certainly declined over the last few years, but I would say it just feels like Windows now. Windows has always had the occasional nonsensical problems you had to find an incantation online to solve. Fortunately, the platform (and its pitfalls) are consistent enough across different platforms and users' experiences that it's generally not super hard to find the right fix. The same is usually true for Macs. The thing with Linux, even in 2019, is that most of its problems are sensical in isolation, there are just more of them. If you really know your system you actually have hope of solving them on your own, whereas you're going to have a much harder time finding a magic fix from someone else who had your exact issue, because there's a good chance nobody else has had your exact issue. Pick your poison.
• yalogin 7y ago
  While I want to sympathize with the author here he hasn't given any examples. If he/she has come up with blanket statements like "does not work with external monitors" or "hardware support is a pain" he should substantiate his claims by telling us what he did and how many monitors he tried. He also does not mention why having one channel to install software is a bad thing. I am sure he saw issues but presenting use cases will help his argument. I do have an issue with the software installation source. On the whole I see it as a good thing. Linux in 2000 had a problem (one that isn't resolved even now), there is no one channel that gets you all you want, you are inevitably forced to go and find software and install from source which doesn't recognize that dependencies are already solved and will simply install copies again which will fuck up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and nothing works. Macs on the other hand for the most part don't have that problem. If the app store does not meet your needs, you are most likely a developer and so you would go through home-brew.
  • ubermonkey 7y ago
    He didn't provide examples for monitors or hardware, I suspect, because he cannot do so in a way that doesn't make it clear his claims are extremely weak and thin.
• RocketSyntax 7y ago
  My thunderbolt monitor is struggling to be detected after update >,<
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  Apple's strength has been hardware/software integration for a long time. If you have an Apple product, you can be reasonably sure that if you connect it to another Apple product, it will work well with minimal work. Linux's biggest weakness (for the situations where one would use an Apple product) is hardware/software integration. If you have a Linux laptop for a while, you've probably spent hours tinkering with hardware drivers, and are still not happy with the results. System76 seems to at least recognize the problem and be trying to work on it in Pop!OS, which I'm excited about.
• CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers. Apple has always had an unusually strong contingent of people like this. But I guess if you were going to stick with them in the 1990s, you had to have an irrational attachment to their brand.
• travbrack 7y ago
  As someone who's run both desktop Linux for a couple years and OS X for the last 5... Not even close. Desktop Linux is an exercise in insanity.
• arminiusreturns 7y ago
  One thing I have to say, in general to many of the posts here about the state of linux, is that linux is just the kernel, and the vast majority of issues people tend to have is due to one or a combination of distro choice and DE/WM choice. I went linux exclusive personally and professionally a few years ago and have nothing but good things to say about it, but far too often I see stuff complaining about linux when it's really not linux per se, but the other software choices. So, protip, if you are having issues with things like multi-monitors, etc, start out by trying a different DE like awesome/i3, xfce, etc, rather than the big 2 (KDE/Gnome), and if that fails try a another distro (such as Manjaro). I almost always use Manjaro these days because the hardware detector is second to none, but I used to distrohop habitually and if you get a new laptop it's almost a requirement to try out different distros until you find the one that just works, and this especially applies to MacBooks, which I used to triple boot but started doing linux only on because sometimes it's easier to get a macbook approved in some companies than the equivalent hardware normal laptop. One side benefit of going linux only is that I have, besides gaming, almost completely GPLized my stack. Plus, I believe if you are managing systems you should be running the OS those systems live on. EG if your core systems are debian, you should have a debian install somewhere that you interact with daily. I can't tell you how many times I've had to help devops people recover from things like MacOS text bunging or outdated bash related problems. I think they should be doing the dev work at least in a container (lxc, etc) on what they are working on instead of the native system.
• spookthesunset 7y ago
  And in typical fashion, this person lists the exact problem I'm having with my mac (disk space not reclaimed after deleting files) and says "fixed it" without ever saying what steps they did to actually fix the problem. Now they'll get indexed by Google and show up on top so the next person with this problem will find the post, but not find any helpful solution.
• kd3 7y ago
  The Linux of 2019 is still pretty much the Linux of 2000. Apple caught up.
• gambiting 7y ago
  "Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" that's still Linux for me, nothing has changed in the last 19 years.
• kaonashi 7y ago
  Got fed up recently and ordered a windows laptop for dev work; I'm hoping WSL will meet my needs and I can get away with a VM for osx, but we'll see.
• interlinkedcell 7y ago
  I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon when I can. It supports almost everything, and is endlessly flexible, looks nice. Supports a full data science stack + GPU. My work provided me with a Macbook pro which is fine since I run everything in docker anyway, the hardware looks nice but the keyboard sucks. Each key has like .5mm clearance and one grain of dirt will stop it from working. I would never buy another mac because their walled garden policy is terrible. I use windows for gaming, but hate developing on it. What can I say, it works as a casual desktop. Except if you want to move it to a new drive, or do anything beyond web browsing and video games. They are all okay, not sure why there is so much vitriol in this thread.
• jamil7 7y ago
  Kind of a tiny point but it drove me nuts when using Arch. Did anyone who's tried switching from macOS to linux manage to get comparable trackpad behaviour? I fiddled with this for far too long before more or less settling for something pretty underwhelming. I know it's not the most important detail but it's hard after using a rMBP trackpad for years.
  • mr_isomies 7y ago
    When I saw that it required more than a 5m fix on my Lenovo I just accepted this as my new setup and committed to only using the trackpoint instead. Ironically, as a programmer the trackpoint has now become crucial to my setup (easier on the wrists/thumbs; faster), and made it a lot easier to go "all the way" with tiled windows managers. So the lack of decent trackpad support made me really consider other setups that now I realise work better for me. Obv, your mileage may vary
    • jamil7 7y ago
      Programming wise I'm all onboard with window managers and spend most of my time in vim + tmux but reading articles and browsing documentation or pull requests I really like the trackpad. But maybe you're right and it's a matter of better exploring and accepting other workflows.
• rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Had some laughs. And yes, it's all true, at least to an extent. Unfortunately no OS nails everything, all have their shortcomings. I like Linux, Mac and Windows for different reasons and dislike them for different reasons as well. Where one falls short the other excels. And so on. But if I were to pick only one, it would have to be Windows. Pick two, it would be Windows and Linux; Only thing I like about Mac is the overall quality of their apps. Several of them are unmatched in Windows and specially in Linux;
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• blablabla123 7y ago
  Actually in the 90s with Linux you could destroy your external screen by setting the wrong parameters. [1] It was really easy to destroy your partition table or mess up your whole configuration. I think this is the core difference with MacOS and Linux, really messing up your system is quite difficult. (And destroying hardware was never a thing with Apple :)) [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-the-wrong-sync-frequency-really-destroy-a-crt-monitor https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...
• kabdib 7y ago
  When my 2014 era MacBook Pro dies, I have an XPS15 waiting in the wings. Unless Apple makes significant design improvements, I'm not going back. Windows is terrible in a number of ways, but it's improved dramatically in the last few years and I can get work done on it without raising my blood pressure. Apple's seriously screwing the pooch with developers and designers and doesn't seem to care.
• ubu7737 7y ago
  Very happy with Windows 10 and WSL.
• SkyMarshal 7y ago
  >After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode updated. I had this exact problem recently. There's a simpler, safer solution. Delete files to free up enough space. They're moved to "Reserved Space", and when the system fails to delete them to free up space for new installs/updates, you run sudo purge in the commandline. Wait 20m or so and the Reserved Space should be emptied and your hard drive free space again. http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-mavericks/ http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/14/use-purge-command-os-x-maveri...
• panpanna 7y ago
  > Linux 2000: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports. Was this really a Linux problem in 2000?
• xtat 7y ago
  dang I have trouble wrapping my very linux centric head around this -- seems like a weird comparison
• jason_slack 7y ago
  So what was the mysterious command that was run??