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My feeling is that Apple beancounters have decided macOS is mostly a gateway to Xcode for iOS development, anything else is just to help sell laptops. The stuff
by cflewis 7y ago
My feeling is that Apple beancounters have decided macOS is mostly a gateway to Xcode for iOS development, anything else is just to help sell laptops. The stuff in "anything else" doesn't need to actually work well, just exist so it can be something on the features list.
- api 7y agoIt does help that there is no overall competitor to MacBooks in terms of ease of use or (now that the butterfly keyboard is dead) build quality. There are decent build PC laptops but you have to run Windows or Linux on them. Windows is a dumpster fire these days with ads in the start menu, the use of "dark patterns" to herd people into MS cloud, and out of control unnecessary telemetry. Linux is fine only if you have a lot of time on your hands to troubleshoot edge case issues and hunt for drivers. Linux also still (through no fault of its own) can't run a lot of apps that many people need.
- aftbit 7y agoLinux is the only option IMO, but I have a very high yakshaving tolerance. That said, if you run a recent Ubuntu, most stuff "just works" as long as you don't need Photoshop or the Office suite.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacobsenscott 7y agoOr 4k monitors, or screen sharing when running more than one monitor. That's the reason I haven't switched from macos back to linux (I was all in on linux until about 5 years ago when I started to care about display quality and working remotely).
- Jyaif 7y agoExternal monitor support on macOS is terrible. When it does work, you can't turn on HiDPI resulting in a tiny UI. And the latest 16" macbooks simply kernel panic: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250876794 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250876794
- lostlogin 7y agoDoes System Prefs > Displays > Scaled not work?
- IggleSniggle 7y agoHiDPI is working fine on my 3 external displays
- rekoil 7y agoIt sucks that you are having issues with your setup, but in general macOS is the king of external monitor support. Compare the experience with Windows for example, where disconnecting from your external monitors pushes all applications and windows to the remaining monitors, and doesn't restore them when the external monitor is reconnected. macOS also handles mixed-DPI really well, no other vendor even comes close, Windows simply scales according to the monitor most of the application window is on, resulting in ugly resizing of applications when moving from one monitor to another. I don't know what you're talking about with regards to "turning on HiDPI", can you elaborate?
- lmm 7y ago> Compare the experience with Windows for example, where disconnecting from your external monitors pushes all applications and windows to the remaining monitors, and doesn't restore them when the external monitor is reconnected. Huh? I have a dock that I disconnect and reconnect from all the time; windows move onto my laptop screen when I disconnect, and move back onto my docked screen when I reconnect.
- rekoil 7y agoDo you have multiple screens active at one time? This is really only a problem when you have multiple screens, applications don't "remember" which screen they are supposed to be on, they just go to the "primary" screen when docked.
- vetinari 7y agoYou know, in 5 years, many things changed. What's wrong with 4k monitors? I'm typing this on Fedora machine with one (default install with no tinkering, Gnome on Wayland).
- Finnucane 7y ago4K support seems to vary a bit from distro to distro. Some are good, some are lagging.
- kevingadd 7y agoHigh-DPI is still a mess on Ubuntu (and Debian, for that matter). Last time I used Ubuntu on a 4k panel I had to manually edit some xorg config files. I'm using Debian+KDE right now and I had to manually make some adjustments (in a UI, at least) and it still randomly gets confused sometimes.
- PureParadigm 7y agoNot true for me. I've used several distros (including Ubuntu) with Gnome on my 4K XPS and the worst I've had to do is go into Gnome settings and click 200% GUI scale. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu set that automatically.
- skykooler 7y agoHigh DPI is fine as long as you have just one display. However, there's no good way to have one high-dpi display and one normal one (for example, a laptop with high dpi screen connected to a standard external monitor).
- vetinari 7y agoThere is a good way to have mixed-dpi setup: you use Gnome-on-Wayland (for normal users who expect normal desktop) or Sway (for those who want tiling wm). Mixed DPI is not coming to X11 displays. If you insist on X11, you are going to have bad time.
- 7y ago
- martin8412 7y agoI'm using Linux with 3x 4k monitors at work. I set the scaling to 150% and it just works. I'm using Awesome WM.
- jacobsenscott 7y agoIf all your monitors are 4k it works, but if you have a mix of high dpi and standard dpi monitors it does not work. And I'm betting you can't share just one of those monitors with any screen sharing software. Something I need to do frequently.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoSharing a window may work and amount to the same thing. Depends on the software perhaps.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoTwo 4k monitors here on Ubuntu Mate, works great. Shared my screen last week.
- api 7y agoI would agree were it not for the hairy yaks. As a startup founder I just don't have time for my computer to not "just work." This is the primary thing that keeps me absolutely glued to Apple. I do kind of like MacOS, but am concerned about their lack of strong interest in it. I would pay for a "vertically integrated" open hardware Linux laptop. I've seen some promising projects but none are mature enough. The second issue is apps, but that can be mitigated by having a Windows VM.
- null4bl3 7y agoBut this entire thread of comments and even the topic of the post is proof that it really just doesn't work. I would argue that any major Linux distro at this point "just work" just as well as MacOS
- jolux 7y ago> But this entire thread of comments and even the topic of the post is proof that it really just doesn't work. Yeah, there may actually be close to a dozen people commenting here! >I would argue that any major Linux distro at this point "just work" just as well as MacOS Given my perennial attempts to switch to Linux which are inevitably thwarted by aggravating driver bugs and incompatibility issues with X Windows and Wayland (both), I'm inclined to disagree.
- pjmlp 7y agoOr do any kind of serious 3D or audio related work.
- pachico 7y agoIs this still an issue with Ubuntu? I haven't had any problems with drivers nor software for... 6 years and 7 laptops?
- skrtskrt 7y agoSupport for 4K monitors and multiple screens is still pretty miserable and causes stuttering, freezing, and crashing
- ahsima1 7y agoNever had any problems with my 4K screen in Manjaro KDE, and only needed to change Xft.dpi in .Xresources in Manjaro i3
- skrtskrt 7y agoI’m not saying it cannot work but I am saying an IT department cannot just install Ubuntu on a laptop, hand it to someone who doesn’t know how to hack at Linux, and have the display aspects “just work” with any monitor. I have no beef with Linux, but we have to be honest about what it needs to be capable of to compete with MacOS for the general user unable or unwilling to hack at it a bit. If the solution in any way involves "enter this command", you have lost the vast, vast majority of users. Those users will never have any idea that "Catalina broke SSH".
- vbezhenar 7y agoThere are plenty of good laptops and Windows is absolutely fine.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoWindows is not "absolutely fine". Ignoring the garbage heap of bad/inconsistent ui/adverts/nagware. Its just not even capable of running a lot of dev software. The guide for running ruby on rails on windows is basically just to install a linux VM.
- pjmlp 7y agoIt runs perfectly fine lot of developer software, for those of us that are Windows developers first, and something else secondly.
- vbezhenar 7y agoI'm running a lot of dev software and I never had to revert to Linux VM. https://rubyinstaller.org/ https://rubyinstaller.org/ Ruby for Windows. I don't know why Ruby on Rails require Linux, but those reasons are not technical.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoIf you pick your laptop for linux support then you will have literally no driver issues. I'm running fedora on a Dell XPS and it runs flawlessly (Well the fingerprint scanner needs a 3rd party program). Ubuntu is generally even easier since they bundle in proprietary drivers.
- pjmlp 7y agoAs if, I bought a Linux Laptop from Asus with Ubuntu, and my APU is still to get the OpenGL 4.4 that it had with the proprietary AMD driver, instead I should be happy that the open source version at least offers me OpenGL 3.3.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoThats unlucky but it doesn't apply to all laptops. My dell XPS is currently running on a vulkan version released in 2020. AMD strangely seems to lag behind intel in drivers at the moment. Perhaps because until just now AMD laptops were rare.
- asveikau 7y agoI feel like they are doing random deprecations with replacements that don't work as well as the original. As in, leaving the deprecated thing unmaintained but present in the install would be a better outcome. I wonder why they are wasting so much time doing this when they appear to have a working system. I'm not even talking about big items like 32-bit support or opengl but completely random libraries that work fine.
- MiroF 7y agoAs just another random instance, I updated my MacOS about a year ago and now I can only change the last 3 parts of my MAC address, the remainder appear to be fixed. I know my hardware has the ability to change my entire MAC address - I don't get why they are doing this.
- bostik 7y agoBranding? The leading octets in MAC addresses are often called "vendor prefixes", and are assigned to various hardware vendors. Apple probably wants to ensure that all their devices show up in ARP scans and MAC lookups as Apple devices.
- smolder 7y agoTo make it harder to spoof specific devices, perhaps. Commercial end-user OS vendors generally don't think your computer being able to do something implies you should have control over that capability.
- neets 7y agoI guess they are getting ready to run MacOS on Arm rather than AMD64
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoThis is a completely standard failure mode of large organizations. You have a product that works perfectly fine the way it is, but you also have an entire team of people whose job it is to do something with that product. The existing product has already been optimized for years and most changes are moves away from optimal rather than towards it, but they can't get paid to do nothing, so they change things that were better the way they were. This is related to the thing where what customers want most is bug fixes for existing bugs but what marketing wants most is new features to sell to new customers and marketing tends to win, which causes the number of bugs to go up rather than down over time.