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Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, ri

Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

drclau 7y ago
You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2. Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered. I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.
- esotericn 7y ago
  It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    I see very little evidence of that. I suspect what you mean when you say "it didn't work" is actually, "they didn't like it", which is actually not the same thing. I see a lot of people saying they didn't like things on Macs, not a lot of people saying things didn't work on Macs.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      I've never used an OS that actually _didn't work_. Unless we're talking about 15+ years ago before Linux had driver support for most stuff, or trying to like, just install Mac OS on an unsupported platform without hackintosh workarounds.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience. Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess. The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.
kerkeslager 7y ago
Pretty much, yes. You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do. It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do: 1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang. 2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved). The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.

Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

drclau 7y ago

You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.

rbanffy 7y ago
There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2. Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered. I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.
thedaemon 7y ago
Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.
esotericn 7y ago
It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I see very little evidence of that. I suspect what you mean when you say "it didn't work" is actually, "they didn't like it", which is actually not the same thing. I see a lot of people saying they didn't like things on Macs, not a lot of people saying things didn't work on Macs.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I've never used an OS that actually _didn't work_. Unless we're talking about 15+ years ago before Linux had driver support for most stuff, or trying to like, just install Mac OS on an unsupported platform without hackintosh workarounds.
heavyset_go 7y ago
I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience. Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess. The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.

kerkeslager 7y ago

Pretty much, yes. You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do. It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do: 1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang. 2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved). The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.