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Pretty light on specifics. The article has no details showing why FreeBSD is better than macOS for the author's workflow, except that there are a lot of process

Pretty light on specifics. The article has no details showing why FreeBSD is better than macOS for the author's workflow, except that there are a lot of processes running and setup apparently takes longer. > This is where many people will tell me “Okay but not everything works outside the box”, true! but which OS works outside the box these days anyway? Windows is still a nightmare, setting up macOS took me 3 days the last time, Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. Setting up FreeBSD took me 3 days, however this meant that I will NOT need to change it again for a very, very, VERY long time. Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. I also use it for dev using the Linux subsystem with WSL2 and Powershell. Why did setting up macOS take 3 days? I don't even think it would take 1 day if I set up a new machine from scratch. Why are you building Linux from scratch for comparison??? It took me two hours to set up Debian by hand yesterday. And then they say FreeBSD also took 3 days of setup (?!), but that's alright because they won't have to change it going forward. Leaving aside my skepticism of that last part, the same probably applies to macOS. EDIT: I think the author actually is better served by FreeBSD given the fact that they were hand-modifying persistent packet-filter rules. That is not a thing I would suggest someone do on a macOS machine. But the head scratcher I have is why they would try to do this on macOS (or Windows) in the first place, and why setup times took so long besides the breaking updates.

dionian 6y ago
This says a lot: > Most importantly, it’s Free and Open Source. "Most importantly" ?
- m463 6y ago
  If you've experienced computer use for any length of time, that is the root of everything. like for instance: > Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted. I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this. You'd be surprised -- unless you follow dev forums for various elements of your DE/distro. macOS moves because it updates into a clean system as far as those configs are concerned. In any case, it takes like 2 minutes to write a shell script to deploy your pf.conf/automount config after every such upgrade, and 1 seconds to use it. Or to look for the proper, permanent, way to do it: https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mountain-lion/ https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mount... With brew and brew mas you can also automate command line and GUI app installations, even custom font installs, among other things. I can get up and running into a new machine in ~2 hours from a clean install with an automated shell script and get all my apps and cli apps, custom shell aliases/scripts, configuration for dev tools like VSCode and IntelliJ, documents (from TM/Dropbox) and so on.
  - agytvfr 6y ago
    > I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this. I mean Gnome3 has removed features pretty regularly that people liked without any real discussion. I don't think that is a closed/open source thing, more of a project communication thing.
    - boogies 6y ago
      GNOME 3 is an anomaly, and the community still actively maintains 2 as MATE (Ubuntu Mate was on HN’s frontpage for a bit ~2 weeks ago).
    - m463 6y ago
      I don't know if it's clear, but pf.conf contains your firewall rules. I know there are issues upgrading applications on every platform, but I think pf.conf should be treated in a very conservative manner.
- greatgoat420 6y ago
  Some people care a lot about Open Source Ideology. The BSDs are free in a different way than Linux is Free, GPL vs BSD licensing. Separately the source code for FreeBSD is pretty clean and easy to read. I needed to modify the behaviour of one of the core utils a few years ago, and I found it very easy to do. The C library that it uses is also pretty well written. It won't be quite as clean as OpenBSD, but it is a lot simpler than trying to figure out glibc(which was possibly intentionally obfuscated to avoid lawsuits). The build system for FreeBSD is also pretty simple to figure out. You can download the source, modify the kernel or userland and rebuild world in like at most like 30 commands. I haven't tried with Debian or any Linux distro, but I would imagine it would be harder given the separation of the kernel and userland.
- samizdis 6y ago
  To the author, it would seem so. There might be a clue in the site name, too: "Freedom Be With All".
dhruvkar 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. Buy any consumer machine with Windows 10 and it comes with so much pre-loaded doodoo, that it takes a couple hours to purge it down to the basics. In fact, so much so, that there are a myriad of scripts to help do this [0]. 0 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Or you can just use the "Reset PC” feature and disable "Restore preinstalled apps" to reinstall the OS without the OEM bloat.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    Nowadays, windows comes with bloat that is first-party (all the xbox stuff, etc).
- free2OSS 6y ago
  I unfortunately agree, but windows makes it extremely easy to wipe it and start over in 1 click. I own 2 windows 10 laptops, I only had to click the button 2 times in my life. It's like windows realized hardware companies were going to do this and wanted to make it easy to defeat them.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    So I haven't tried this lately, but the last time I did, resetting windows this way did reset it... to the bloated crapware fest that the vendor had delivered it as. Did that change?
    - free2OSS 6y ago
      I got my laptop in 2015, it's been clean of crapware since. It's also blazing fast. These modern computers are incredible. Not sure why I'd ever upgrade.
    - 6y ago
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themodelplumber 6y ago
> Why did setting up macOS take 3 days? I don't even think it would take 1 day if I set up a new machine from scratch. I think it might depend on what "setting up" means. For example, "logging into my main day-to-day accounts" might take a couple of hours, max, allowing for even an annoying system-level issue. But installing, configuring, and gaining access to all one's apps might add anywhere from another few hours to another few days, depending on the number of apps, the location of the files, the version delta between new and old systems, and so on. If you have to do some online research and you hit StackOverflow more than a couple of times as you search around, you may be looking at a serious time bump. And if you have to contact the software vendor...well, yikes, in a lot of cases. Days, understandable. Weeks of suffering--possible. This is not even getting into things like working with local network services and local network utilities, configuring old hardware on the new machine, or even changing or disabling new Mac OS or Mac features to suit one's working style. > It took me two hours to set up Debian by hand yesterday. Congrats, :) but this does complicate the question further because now it depends on what is involved in this "by hand" thing. It took me 20 minutes to set up Haiku OS by hand...10 minutes to set up Puppy Linux by hand...what does it mean? That I used my hands? That I plugged in a USB drive and hit "Next" a bunch of times? That I configured and compiled all sources from scratch?
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Trying to build everything from scratch is actually the only time it's ever taken me several days to setup an OS. If that's what the author has to do for whatever reason, I can sympathize with that. I'm probably never going to take the Gentoo approach again, but I can't knock its particular advantages.
- mypalmike 6y ago
  One of the reasons I have stuck with MacOS is that with Time Machine, I don't have to do any install/config when I get a new machine. Just point it at my backup drive and I'm good to go after a restore. It's not a 100% solution for everyone (e.g. multi machine usage) but it's very good at the common 90% use case.
  - 6y ago
nip180 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. I paid $200 for a Windows 10 pro license because I needed to run a Windows application in a virtual machine. I was very unsatisfied with my purchase. I would describe Windows as “a nightmare”. Here are my top three complaints about Windows. * There are advertisements built into the operating system. * The operating system often restarts itself, without the users permission. It will restart itself even if a user launched application is running. * There is still no central repository for useful applications. Managing and keeping all software updated takes a lot of manual work.
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  1. Can't argue there, although once I "uninstall" the advertised apps, I've never had them return 2. There's an option to disable automatic restart for updates 3. There's the winget package manager, but it's still in preview. There's also chocolatey and scoop, which are community run, but that's similar to homebrew on macOS.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    > 2. There's an option to disable automatic restart for updates Where? I've been able to defer reboot, but not disable it completely. ShutUp10 seems to (mostly) work, but automatic updates/reboots somehow get re-enabled sometimes.
    - rewgs 6y ago
      Group Policy.
      - muststopmyths 6y ago
        Group policy does not stop it from eventually rebooting. Though it will stop the "rebooting right after applying an update" horror show. With Group Policy: if you are logged in, Windows will pop a modal dialog in your face and you can preempt it there, but just leaving an application running and being AFK will not prevent reboot if Windows has decided it has waited long enough. The amount of time I can ignore the "restart" request in Windows Updates varies from days to weeks for me. I hate the behavior with a passion, but I can see why Microsoft wants to force reboots eventually. Having un-updated Windows is not good for 90% of the people out there. Honestly speaking, Windows 10 is as far from the spirit of the "I'm a PC" and "Windows 7 was my idea" ad campaigns as you can get. Now it's just "You will bend over and take what we give you, for the greater good" If you want full control of your OS, you need to switch to a BSD or Linux, with appropriate expectations about the applications you will or won't find there. Edit: fix grammar/punctuation a bit
fortran77 6y ago
I run Windows 10 everwhere, too. I stay on the "happy path" hardware-wise. Everything "just works." Really. I code all day long (Erlang, FSharp, C++/CUDA) and I deploy code on Linux and/or Windows servers on Azure.
- free2OSS 6y ago
  The longer I live, the less I'm obsessed with Unix commands too. Everything blends together now. I do so much command line work in various languages learning and googling is just the job. Heck despite me using Ubuntu server for 13 years and mysql for 7 years, I look up syntax and examples. Even as a Lifelong need, nothing on computers can be intuitive, Everything must be learned.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Very light on specifics. I think the one thing he said that resonated is: "Doing forensics is almost impossible." Holy hell, yes. I use a lot of weird USB hardware, and debugging USB serial-port issues is impossible (even with a Beagle USB debugger, it only gets you half way, system logs on macos are not particularly helpful). Why FreeBSD over Linux? This is the most perplexing decision in the article. Why would OP do this? I have FreeBSD running on an old laptop, along side an Ubuntu laptop. There's more software ported for Ubuntu than FreeBSD and I don't want to rebuild everything for BSD, I have too much work to do. Nobody targets BSD but BSD devs. I'd like to know though, OP aside, besides the BSD networking speed and extensions, why FreeBSD over Linux when the latter is more widely supported for GP dev? I feel the author's frustration, though. macOS is really diverging[1] from BSD and become even more obfuscated, and as a power user who spent over two decades working in Linux, it is very hard for me to treat macOS and Win10 seriously as development platforms (to my hireability's detriment, I suppose) for anything other than Node/Electron and playing around for my own projects. > I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. Because you probably don't use Win10 the way other people use it. If you've spent any time developing in Linux, Windows is a pathetic development system once you step outside Visual Studio. The Unix command line is one of the most insanely flexible tools every built, which is why the philosophy has changed so little in 40+ years. (Plus I don't like ads popping up in the toolbar or start menu when I'm trying to work.) [1] Case in point: I tried setting up iPerf on a new MBP today. port/brew both failed to install correctly with lib dependencies broken. `iperf`? Seriously? /smh/ EDIT: I meant despite OP's decision in Q above.
- mbreese 6y ago
  > Why FreeBSD over Linux? From the post: > Linux has systemd, not my favorite thing out there, Windows is privacy nightmare. That left me with 2 major options: Linuxes without systemd (Gentoo, in my case) or BSDs. > Since I run FreeBSD servers anyway, I just migrated to FreeBSD. Basically because the author hates systemd (not an invalid point, but that ship has sailed) and has familiarity with FreeBSD. This isn’t really an article that’s trying to convince people to run FreeBSD. It’s trying to explain why they left macOS. Where they ended up is less consequential, IMO.
ProAm 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? Telemetry, the window manager, BT support, Ads, Cortana for a start.
- greyhair 6y ago
  If you want to talk 'telemetry', see the latest MacOS release.
  - RealOS 6y ago
    Have you met the lord saviour by the name Linux? He does not forgive your stupidities. But for the enligthened and savvy he is a saviour. RTFM and use Linux in other words. It's so pathetic with you cock-windows and cock-mac users
dukeofdoom 6y ago
I'll mention two pain points as a former windows developer. I used to develop windows shareware, all the way back to Windows 95. Back then you could write to the installation folder "c:\program files\myapp" and life was simple. At some point MS figured this was bad security, and you needed to write to the Windows Rigistery (HCKLM / HCKLU) to store your app settings. And write to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\ folder to store your data files. So all of this resulted in 3 different places you needed to write your data to now. But then it gets even more split because, in some cases you needed to run as an admin during the installation, and your appdata will be stored under the admin account. Also, at some point c:\progrm files\ was split, and also they added c:\program files (x86), and I believe the c:\program files\ is virtualized. And the Windows registry is also split for local user, and machine settings, and admin settings. Two issues I ran into: 1. c:\program files\myapp\ I could not trust what I wrote there. I believe its virtualized. So I ran into issues where I would delete a file in my installation folder, and old version would be put back by windows in the background. 2. When a regular user installed my app, and it need to write to HKLM, the app will need to be elevated to admin to be able to do that. This also resulted in another split of settings. Because there are per user settings and per machine settings. In conclusion, app installation became a confusing mess!
- Macha 6y ago
  This divide exists in all OSes now. Linux (XDG): Config: XDG_CONFIG_HOME (~/.config) App: /usr/bin Runtime data: XDG_DATA_HOME (~/.local/share) -- MacOS: (Note: CLI apps often follow the XDG conventions rather than the Mac conventions on OS X) Config: ~/Library/Application Support/ Application: /Applications Runtime data: ~/Library/Application Support
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > In conclusion, app installation became a confusing mess! No, app installation was a confusing mess and now it's been cleaned up. There's nothing wrong with an app separating user-specific data from system-global data. Running an app as a regular user shouldn't require any writes to HKLM!
  - 6y ago
robbyking 6y ago
I agree 100%. While it does take me a day or two to set up a new Mac, 99% of that time is downloading IDEs and configuring them the bizarro way I like them configured.
satysin 6y ago
macOS has a lot of faults but I agree, 3 days to set it up is an odd statement. I have a reasonably convoluted setup with VMware Fusion Windows and Linux guests, a few different developer toolchains (vanilla clang, rust, go, etc) and two dozen developer tools along with all the usual applications and it took me a little over two hours to do a clean install of Big Sur on my MacBook Pro the other week. Homebrew manages 90+% of installations the the few that it doesn't do coming from the App Store or manual download and install. The rest of the work is simply restoring my config files and copying over data all of which is done via a shell script. Windows and Linux (Fedora in my case) is mostly the same with just a little extra work on Windows to manually change some settings that never seem to stick if done another way. Not saying switching to BSD is the wrong thing for this person but having used BSD in the past I wouldn't say it is any quicker to setup than macOS or pretty much any other OS these days. In fact with hardware issues you are likely to run into it can take a lot longer to get an equivalently working system. They even say how WiFi and Bluetooth still isn't as functional or performant as it is elsewhere so who knows how much time they have spent trying to sort that. But as long as the author finds their environment works better for them that is all that really matters. However I feel when people throw out things like 'macOS took 3 days to setup' it weakens their argument as I know that is not "normal" so I wonder if perhaps they are just making up things to justify (to themselves) the switch. I see it a lot when people switch from Windows to macOS or Linux. People come up with all kinds of "reasons" as to why they are doing it and a lot of the time it is more emotional than factual which is fine providing you admit that rather than come up with nonsense claims.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  Anecdotes and all, but yes this has been my experience too. macOS is by far the fastest to get up and running on. Linux distros probably come in second, with the caveat that it's easy to get sucked into a time-burning black hole of fine-grained tweaks if I don't make a point of keeping things close to default. Windows is downright frustrating because even after spending considerable time on setup, there are things that just don't work correctly — for example, changing virtual desktops independent of monitor is not possible with the built-in implementation.
- passthejoe 6y ago
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indymike 6y ago
I thought he was pretty clear about it. Hardware not being serviceable, ux distracting and lots of extra extra. He was also pretty clear about not wanting systemd, and well, Gentoo isn't famous for being something that can be configured quickly. MacOS can be difficult, especially if you are installing lots of non-standard servers, scripting languages and having to configure them. FreeBSD is quite stable, and so there is a big expectation that updates don't break things the way they tend to with Linux and, well, WSL for Windows (which doubles the surface for breaking changes... the Linux distro updates + Windows updates). Sounds like a good choice for the author's needs.
fmakunbound 6y ago
Well sure I guess you can live in WSL and use Powershell (not sure how the two are related?), but what about the rest of the shit. How do you put up with random reboots from updates, demands from Edge to update, all the privacy-invading telemetry, and random shit like Candy Crush installed from the Windows Store?
outworlder 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine It's fine, for you. I spent a day convincing Windows 10 to install on my NVME drive. It didn't like something or other. Brand new, blank drive. Linux installed and worked flawlessly. I actually used it to troubleshoot and mess with partition schemes until Windows was happy. The Windows 'repair' and diagnostic tools are laughable. It is running ok so far. The Linux subsystem and the new shell make it not entirely terrible.
judge2020 6y ago
> Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. If you're building linux from scratch, you're probably not a customer who would consider MacOS or Windows in the first place.
- greyhair 6y ago
  "ding ding ding ding ding ding - We have a winner!" .... exactly
dev_tty01 6y ago
Yeah, I was a little confused by the 3 day comment. When I get a new Mac I use Apple's Migration Assistant to move my environment from the old machine to the new one. That brings over all of my customizations and I am ready to go. I'll go through my change list and make sure everything came over. Sometimes something in /etc needs to be updated or perhaps a license key for an app. It is a simple process, at least for me.
jen729w 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? This just happened. (It’s the reason I’m on HN rather than working right now.) - I get up at 5am to do some early work. - Work laptop (Win10) is still connected to the VPN from yesterday. Cool. - Try to connect to drive. No dice. Try same drive in SharePoint. Failed auth. Reconnect VPN. Same. Oh well, guess I’ll reboot. - Reboot. Go to make coffee. - Come back to black screen. Ah yes, that’s right. If I reboot and McAfee drive encryption has kicked in, and I’m plugged in to my USB-C monitor, all screens are just black. The solution is to... - ...pull the monitor cable, power down the laptop, power it back up, authenticate with McAfee, plug the monitor in, let Windows start, check HN, reply to this post. I know this latter half isn’t Windows’ fault, strictly speaking. But it’s the Wintel laptop’s fault and that’s all the same to me. I hate using Windows. It’s easily the thing I dislike most about my job. Let’s just try my Mac over here, hang on. I’ll open the lid. Yep, worked.
- vips7L 6y ago
  This just sounds like your corporate IT shitware breaking windows.
- rescbr 6y ago
  Corporate IT software on Mac is terrible. I'm happy that my employer has sane Mac policies and management software, but it is due to the large fleet of Apple devices. My wife's employer tries to manage their Macs like it is Windows and it is terrible, IT doesn't test anything on Macs and they don't know how to troubleshoot issues. She has similar issues with the VPN too.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    100%. One of the biggest issues with Mac adoption in “regular” offices. - Sincerely usually the only Mac-proficient IT professional in the team.
allarm 6y ago
Last time I had to switch between my Mac laptops I wrote up an Ansible playbook that does (almost) all the configuration on the new machine - pulls the dot files from git repo and installs everything I need. It takes less than an hour to move to a new system for me now.
haberman 6y ago
> Why is Windows a nightmare? I won't call Windows a "nightmare" overall, but I had a nightmarish experience trying to install it last night. It turns out that creating a bootable USB stick that can install Windows 10 is absurdly difficult. You can download an ISO from Microsoft, but there is literally no way I could find to successfully write that ISO to a USB stick from an OS other than Windows. If you Google "write windows 10 iso to usb linux" and click on a result like https://itsfoss.com/bootable-windows-usb-linux/ https://itsfoss.com/bootable-windows-usb-linux/, the instructions will create a USB stick that will successfully boot to the installer, but will fail shortly thereafter with "A media driver your computer needs is missing". If you Google this error and try to find a solution, it feels like you just asked a witch doctor for medical advice. You'll find advice to try plugging the USB drive into a different USB slot, try using a USB 2.0 drive instead of 3.0, etc. This Stack Overflow answer swears that the cause of this error is that Microsoft's servers corrupt the download of the ISO file in transit by aborting the transfer early: https://superuser.com/a/964362 https://superuser.com/a/964362 (I verified the SHA of my file and it was fine). Many answers suggest that using the Windows Media Creation Tool from Windows is the most reliable way to do it. I managed to resurrect my old Windows partition and boot into it, and indeed the Windows Media Creation Tool burned a USB stick that successfully booted the installer. But when I tried to select the partition I wanted to install onto, I got the error "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the gpt partition style." If you Google this error, it sounds like when you create the bootable USB, you create it as either a BIOS-booting or a UEFI-booting variety of boot disk, and once created, it can only install onto a MBR or GPT partition, respectively. The Windows Media Creation Tool did not ask me which kind I wanted, it (apparently) just creates a BIOS-booting USB by default. The only way I was ultimately able to install onto my GPT partition was to use Rufus, which explicitly lets you choose between UEFI and BIOS when you create the USB. It is amusing that Rufus runs on Windows only (so you need to have Windows to install Windows). Luckily I was able to use the VirtualBox images provided by Microsoft for Microsoft Edge testing to run Rufus and create the USB. Once Windows is installed it's pretty reliable. But it is a nightmare to install.
- greyhair 6y ago
  Wait, there is an automatic tool to create the USB stick. I use it regularly. I think it is interesting that you can still buy old Windows 7 hardware, and just stick the Windows 10 install USB into it, reboot, and be on your way. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 The second option. Easy as pie.
joshspankit 6y ago
Based on the tone of when it was introduced in the article, I would say that the author means that Windows has a lot of stuff running on a normal install that is unnecessary and entirely fragmented both in location of files and in location of configurations. One thing that keeps me somewhat sane in windows are those heroes who spend hundreds of hours figuring out what each system service does, whether it’s needed, and how to disable it if it’s not.
hastradamus 6y ago
Without first hand macos 'power user' experience I can understand why it might be difficult to wrap your head around. Sometimes things that might take you 5 seconds on Linux take your 8 hours for some reason. Like installing Python. And the. A version changes something and you need to reinstall python but everything is broken and nothing works. And then all of a sudden home brew doesn't work and you need to spend a week researching why and it turns out you need to boot into single user mode and chmod every folder in some directory for everything to work. Pure nightmare

dionian 6y ago

This says a lot: > Most importantly, it’s Free and Open Source. "Most importantly" ?

m463 6y ago
If you've experienced computer use for any length of time, that is the root of everything. like for instance: > Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted. I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this. You'd be surprised -- unless you follow dev forums for various elements of your DE/distro. macOS moves because it updates into a clean system as far as those configs are concerned. In any case, it takes like 2 minutes to write a shell script to deploy your pf.conf/automount config after every such upgrade, and 1 seconds to use it. Or to look for the proper, permanent, way to do it: https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mountain-lion/ https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mount... With brew and brew mas you can also automate command line and GUI app installations, even custom font installs, among other things. I can get up and running into a new machine in ~2 hours from a clean install with an automated shell script and get all my apps and cli apps, custom shell aliases/scripts, configuration for dev tools like VSCode and IntelliJ, documents (from TM/Dropbox) and so on.
- agytvfr 6y ago
  > I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this. I mean Gnome3 has removed features pretty regularly that people liked without any real discussion. I don't think that is a closed/open source thing, more of a project communication thing.
  - boogies 6y ago
    GNOME 3 is an anomaly, and the community still actively maintains 2 as MATE (Ubuntu Mate was on HN’s frontpage for a bit ~2 weeks ago).
  - m463 6y ago
    I don't know if it's clear, but pf.conf contains your firewall rules. I know there are issues upgrading applications on every platform, but I think pf.conf should be treated in a very conservative manner.
greatgoat420 6y ago
Some people care a lot about Open Source Ideology. The BSDs are free in a different way than Linux is Free, GPL vs BSD licensing. Separately the source code for FreeBSD is pretty clean and easy to read. I needed to modify the behaviour of one of the core utils a few years ago, and I found it very easy to do. The C library that it uses is also pretty well written. It won't be quite as clean as OpenBSD, but it is a lot simpler than trying to figure out glibc(which was possibly intentionally obfuscated to avoid lawsuits). The build system for FreeBSD is also pretty simple to figure out. You can download the source, modify the kernel or userland and rebuild world in like at most like 30 commands. I haven't tried with Debian or any Linux distro, but I would imagine it would be harder given the separation of the kernel and userland.
samizdis 6y ago
To the author, it would seem so. There might be a clue in the site name, too: "Freedom Be With All".

dhruvkar 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. Buy any consumer machine with Windows 10 and it comes with so much pre-loaded doodoo, that it takes a couple hours to purge it down to the basics. In fact, so much so, that there are a myriad of scripts to help do this [0]. 0 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

ChrisSD 6y ago
Or you can just use the "Reset PC” feature and disable "Restore preinstalled apps" to reinstall the OS without the OEM bloat.
- vetinari 6y ago
  Nowadays, windows comes with bloat that is first-party (all the xbox stuff, etc).
free2OSS 6y ago
I unfortunately agree, but windows makes it extremely easy to wipe it and start over in 1 click. I own 2 windows 10 laptops, I only had to click the button 2 times in my life. It's like windows realized hardware companies were going to do this and wanted to make it easy to defeat them.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  So I haven't tried this lately, but the last time I did, resetting windows this way did reset it... to the bloated crapware fest that the vendor had delivered it as. Did that change?
  - free2OSS 6y ago
    I got my laptop in 2015, it's been clean of crapware since. It's also blazing fast. These modern computers are incredible. Not sure why I'd ever upgrade.
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themodelplumber 6y ago

> Why did setting up macOS take 3 days? I don't even think it would take 1 day if I set up a new machine from scratch. I think it might depend on what "setting up" means. For example, "logging into my main day-to-day accounts" might take a couple of hours, max, allowing for even an annoying system-level issue. But installing, configuring, and gaining access to all one's apps might add anywhere from another few hours to another few days, depending on the number of apps, the location of the files, the version delta between new and old systems, and so on. If you have to do some online research and you hit StackOverflow more than a couple of times as you search around, you may be looking at a serious time bump. And if you have to contact the software vendor...well, yikes, in a lot of cases. Days, understandable. Weeks of suffering--possible. This is not even getting into things like working with local network services and local network utilities, configuring old hardware on the new machine, or even changing or disabling new Mac OS or Mac features to suit one's working style. > It took me two hours to set up Debian by hand yesterday. Congrats, :) but this does complicate the question further because now it depends on what is involved in this "by hand" thing. It took me 20 minutes to set up Haiku OS by hand...10 minutes to set up Puppy Linux by hand...what does it mean? That I used my hands? That I plugged in a USB drive and hit "Next" a bunch of times? That I configured and compiled all sources from scratch?

fractionalhare 6y ago
Trying to build everything from scratch is actually the only time it's ever taken me several days to setup an OS. If that's what the author has to do for whatever reason, I can sympathize with that. I'm probably never going to take the Gentoo approach again, but I can't knock its particular advantages.
mypalmike 6y ago
One of the reasons I have stuck with MacOS is that with Time Machine, I don't have to do any install/config when I get a new machine. Just point it at my backup drive and I'm good to go after a restore. It's not a 100% solution for everyone (e.g. multi machine usage) but it's very good at the common 90% use case.
- 6y ago

nip180 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. I paid $200 for a Windows 10 pro license because I needed to run a Windows application in a virtual machine. I was very unsatisfied with my purchase. I would describe Windows as “a nightmare”. Here are my top three complaints about Windows. * There are advertisements built into the operating system. * The operating system often restarts itself, without the users permission. It will restart itself even if a user launched application is running. * There is still no central repository for useful applications. Managing and keeping all software updated takes a lot of manual work.

nvrspyx 6y ago
1. Can't argue there, although once I "uninstall" the advertised apps, I've never had them return 2. There's an option to disable automatic restart for updates 3. There's the winget package manager, but it's still in preview. There's also chocolatey and scoop, which are community run, but that's similar to homebrew on macOS.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > 2. There's an option to disable automatic restart for updates Where? I've been able to defer reboot, but not disable it completely. ShutUp10 seems to (mostly) work, but automatic updates/reboots somehow get re-enabled sometimes.
  - rewgs 6y ago
    Group Policy.
    - muststopmyths 6y ago
      Group policy does not stop it from eventually rebooting. Though it will stop the "rebooting right after applying an update" horror show. With Group Policy: if you are logged in, Windows will pop a modal dialog in your face and you can preempt it there, but just leaving an application running and being AFK will not prevent reboot if Windows has decided it has waited long enough. The amount of time I can ignore the "restart" request in Windows Updates varies from days to weeks for me. I hate the behavior with a passion, but I can see why Microsoft wants to force reboots eventually. Having un-updated Windows is not good for 90% of the people out there. Honestly speaking, Windows 10 is as far from the spirit of the "I'm a PC" and "Windows 7 was my idea" ad campaigns as you can get. Now it's just "You will bend over and take what we give you, for the greater good" If you want full control of your OS, you need to switch to a BSD or Linux, with appropriate expectations about the applications you will or won't find there. Edit: fix grammar/punctuation a bit

fortran77 6y ago

I run Windows 10 everwhere, too. I stay on the "happy path" hardware-wise. Everything "just works." Really. I code all day long (Erlang, FSharp, C++/CUDA) and I deploy code on Linux and/or Windows servers on Azure.

free2OSS 6y ago
The longer I live, the less I'm obsessed with Unix commands too. Everything blends together now. I do so much command line work in various languages learning and googling is just the job. Heck despite me using Ubuntu server for 13 years and mysql for 7 years, I look up syntax and examples. Even as a Lifelong need, nothing on computers can be intuitive, Everything must be learned.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Very light on specifics. I think the one thing he said that resonated is: "Doing forensics is almost impossible." Holy hell, yes. I use a lot of weird USB hardware, and debugging USB serial-port issues is impossible (even with a Beagle USB debugger, it only gets you half way, system logs on macos are not particularly helpful). Why FreeBSD over Linux? This is the most perplexing decision in the article. Why would OP do this? I have FreeBSD running on an old laptop, along side an Ubuntu laptop. There's more software ported for Ubuntu than FreeBSD and I don't want to rebuild everything for BSD, I have too much work to do. Nobody targets BSD but BSD devs. I'd like to know though, OP aside, besides the BSD networking speed and extensions, why FreeBSD over Linux when the latter is more widely supported for GP dev? I feel the author's frustration, though. macOS is really diverging[1] from BSD and become even more obfuscated, and as a power user who spent over two decades working in Linux, it is very hard for me to treat macOS and Win10 seriously as development platforms (to my hireability's detriment, I suppose) for anything other than Node/Electron and playing around for my own projects. > I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine. Because you probably don't use Win10 the way other people use it. If you've spent any time developing in Linux, Windows is a pathetic development system once you step outside Visual Studio. The Unix command line is one of the most insanely flexible tools every built, which is why the philosophy has changed so little in 40+ years. (Plus I don't like ads popping up in the toolbar or start menu when I'm trying to work.) [1] Case in point: I tried setting up iPerf on a new MBP today. port/brew both failed to install correctly with lib dependencies broken. `iperf`? Seriously? /smh/ EDIT: I meant despite OP's decision in Q above.

mbreese 6y ago
> Why FreeBSD over Linux? From the post: > Linux has systemd, not my favorite thing out there, Windows is privacy nightmare. That left me with 2 major options: Linuxes without systemd (Gentoo, in my case) or BSDs. > Since I run FreeBSD servers anyway, I just migrated to FreeBSD. Basically because the author hates systemd (not an invalid point, but that ship has sailed) and has familiarity with FreeBSD. This isn’t really an article that’s trying to convince people to run FreeBSD. It’s trying to explain why they left macOS. Where they ended up is less consequential, IMO.

ProAm 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? Telemetry, the window manager, BT support, Ads, Cortana for a start.

greyhair 6y ago
If you want to talk 'telemetry', see the latest MacOS release.
- RealOS 6y ago
  Have you met the lord saviour by the name Linux? He does not forgive your stupidities. But for the enligthened and savvy he is a saviour. RTFM and use Linux in other words. It's so pathetic with you cock-windows and cock-mac users

dukeofdoom 6y ago

I'll mention two pain points as a former windows developer. I used to develop windows shareware, all the way back to Windows 95. Back then you could write to the installation folder "c:\program files\myapp" and life was simple. At some point MS figured this was bad security, and you needed to write to the Windows Rigistery (HCKLM / HCKLU) to store your app settings. And write to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\ folder to store your data files. So all of this resulted in 3 different places you needed to write your data to now. But then it gets even more split because, in some cases you needed to run as an admin during the installation, and your appdata will be stored under the admin account. Also, at some point c:\progrm files\ was split, and also they added c:\program files (x86), and I believe the c:\program files\ is virtualized. And the Windows registry is also split for local user, and machine settings, and admin settings. Two issues I ran into: 1. c:\program files\myapp\ I could not trust what I wrote there. I believe its virtualized. So I ran into issues where I would delete a file in my installation folder, and old version would be put back by windows in the background. 2. When a regular user installed my app, and it need to write to HKLM, the app will need to be elevated to admin to be able to do that. This also resulted in another split of settings. Because there are per user settings and per machine settings. In conclusion, app installation became a confusing mess!

Macha 6y ago
This divide exists in all OSes now. Linux (XDG): Config: XDG_CONFIG_HOME (~/.config) App: /usr/bin Runtime data: XDG_DATA_HOME (~/.local/share) -- MacOS: (Note: CLI apps often follow the XDG conventions rather than the Mac conventions on OS X) Config: ~/Library/Application Support/ Application: /Applications Runtime data: ~/Library/Application Support
quotemstr 6y ago
> In conclusion, app installation became a confusing mess! No, app installation was a confusing mess and now it's been cleaned up. There's nothing wrong with an app separating user-specific data from system-global data. Running an app as a regular user shouldn't require any writes to HKLM!
- 6y ago

robbyking 6y ago

I agree 100%. While it does take me a day or two to set up a new Mac, 99% of that time is downloading IDEs and configuring them the bizarro way I like them configured.

satysin 6y ago

macOS has a lot of faults but I agree, 3 days to set it up is an odd statement. I have a reasonably convoluted setup with VMware Fusion Windows and Linux guests, a few different developer toolchains (vanilla clang, rust, go, etc) and two dozen developer tools along with all the usual applications and it took me a little over two hours to do a clean install of Big Sur on my MacBook Pro the other week. Homebrew manages 90+% of installations the the few that it doesn't do coming from the App Store or manual download and install. The rest of the work is simply restoring my config files and copying over data all of which is done via a shell script. Windows and Linux (Fedora in my case) is mostly the same with just a little extra work on Windows to manually change some settings that never seem to stick if done another way. Not saying switching to BSD is the wrong thing for this person but having used BSD in the past I wouldn't say it is any quicker to setup than macOS or pretty much any other OS these days. In fact with hardware issues you are likely to run into it can take a lot longer to get an equivalently working system. They even say how WiFi and Bluetooth still isn't as functional or performant as it is elsewhere so who knows how much time they have spent trying to sort that. But as long as the author finds their environment works better for them that is all that really matters. However I feel when people throw out things like 'macOS took 3 days to setup' it weakens their argument as I know that is not "normal" so I wonder if perhaps they are just making up things to justify (to themselves) the switch. I see it a lot when people switch from Windows to macOS or Linux. People come up with all kinds of "reasons" as to why they are doing it and a lot of the time it is more emotional than factual which is fine providing you admit that rather than come up with nonsense claims.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
Anecdotes and all, but yes this has been my experience too. macOS is by far the fastest to get up and running on. Linux distros probably come in second, with the caveat that it's easy to get sucked into a time-burning black hole of fine-grained tweaks if I don't make a point of keeping things close to default. Windows is downright frustrating because even after spending considerable time on setup, there are things that just don't work correctly — for example, changing virtual desktops independent of monitor is not possible with the built-in implementation.
passthejoe 6y ago

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indymike 6y ago

I thought he was pretty clear about it. Hardware not being serviceable, ux distracting and lots of extra extra. He was also pretty clear about not wanting systemd, and well, Gentoo isn't famous for being something that can be configured quickly. MacOS can be difficult, especially if you are installing lots of non-standard servers, scripting languages and having to configure them. FreeBSD is quite stable, and so there is a big expectation that updates don't break things the way they tend to with Linux and, well, WSL for Windows (which doubles the surface for breaking changes... the Linux distro updates + Windows updates). Sounds like a good choice for the author's needs.

fmakunbound 6y ago

Well sure I guess you can live in WSL and use Powershell (not sure how the two are related?), but what about the rest of the shit. How do you put up with random reboots from updates, demands from Edge to update, all the privacy-invading telemetry, and random shit like Candy Crush installed from the Windows Store?

outworlder 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine It's fine, for you. I spent a day convincing Windows 10 to install on my NVME drive. It didn't like something or other. Brand new, blank drive. Linux installed and worked flawlessly. I actually used it to troubleshoot and mess with partition schemes until Windows was happy. The Windows 'repair' and diagnostic tools are laughable. It is running ok so far. The Linux subsystem and the new shell make it not entirely terrible.

judge2020 6y ago

> Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. If you're building linux from scratch, you're probably not a customer who would consider MacOS or Windows in the first place.

greyhair 6y ago
"ding ding ding ding ding ding - We have a winner!" .... exactly

dev_tty01 6y ago

Yeah, I was a little confused by the 3 day comment. When I get a new Mac I use Apple's Migration Assistant to move my environment from the old machine to the new one. That brings over all of my customizations and I am ready to go. I'll go through my change list and make sure everything came over. Sometimes something in /etc needs to be updated or perhaps a license key for an app. It is a simple process, at least for me.

jen729w 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? This just happened. (It’s the reason I’m on HN rather than working right now.) - I get up at 5am to do some early work. - Work laptop (Win10) is still connected to the VPN from yesterday. Cool. - Try to connect to drive. No dice. Try same drive in SharePoint. Failed auth. Reconnect VPN. Same. Oh well, guess I’ll reboot. - Reboot. Go to make coffee. - Come back to black screen. Ah yes, that’s right. If I reboot and McAfee drive encryption has kicked in, and I’m plugged in to my USB-C monitor, all screens are just black. The solution is to... - ...pull the monitor cable, power down the laptop, power it back up, authenticate with McAfee, plug the monitor in, let Windows start, check HN, reply to this post. I know this latter half isn’t Windows’ fault, strictly speaking. But it’s the Wintel laptop’s fault and that’s all the same to me. I hate using Windows. It’s easily the thing I dislike most about my job. Let’s just try my Mac over here, hang on. I’ll open the lid. Yep, worked.

vips7L 6y ago
This just sounds like your corporate IT shitware breaking windows.
rescbr 6y ago
Corporate IT software on Mac is terrible. I'm happy that my employer has sane Mac policies and management software, but it is due to the large fleet of Apple devices. My wife's employer tries to manage their Macs like it is Windows and it is terrible, IT doesn't test anything on Macs and they don't know how to troubleshoot issues. She has similar issues with the VPN too.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  100%. One of the biggest issues with Mac adoption in “regular” offices. - Sincerely usually the only Mac-proficient IT professional in the team.

allarm 6y ago

Last time I had to switch between my Mac laptops I wrote up an Ansible playbook that does (almost) all the configuration on the new machine - pulls the dot files from git repo and installs everything I need. It takes less than an hour to move to a new system for me now.

haberman 6y ago

> Why is Windows a nightmare? I won't call Windows a "nightmare" overall, but I had a nightmarish experience trying to install it last night. It turns out that creating a bootable USB stick that can install Windows 10 is absurdly difficult. You can download an ISO from Microsoft, but there is literally no way I could find to successfully write that ISO to a USB stick from an OS other than Windows. If you Google "write windows 10 iso to usb linux" and click on a result like https://itsfoss.com/bootable-windows-usb-linux/ https://itsfoss.com/bootable-windows-usb-linux/, the instructions will create a USB stick that will successfully boot to the installer, but will fail shortly thereafter with "A media driver your computer needs is missing". If you Google this error and try to find a solution, it feels like you just asked a witch doctor for medical advice. You'll find advice to try plugging the USB drive into a different USB slot, try using a USB 2.0 drive instead of 3.0, etc. This Stack Overflow answer swears that the cause of this error is that Microsoft's servers corrupt the download of the ISO file in transit by aborting the transfer early: https://superuser.com/a/964362 https://superuser.com/a/964362 (I verified the SHA of my file and it was fine). Many answers suggest that using the Windows Media Creation Tool from Windows is the most reliable way to do it. I managed to resurrect my old Windows partition and boot into it, and indeed the Windows Media Creation Tool burned a USB stick that successfully booted the installer. But when I tried to select the partition I wanted to install onto, I got the error "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the gpt partition style." If you Google this error, it sounds like when you create the bootable USB, you create it as either a BIOS-booting or a UEFI-booting variety of boot disk, and once created, it can only install onto a MBR or GPT partition, respectively. The Windows Media Creation Tool did not ask me which kind I wanted, it (apparently) just creates a BIOS-booting USB by default. The only way I was ultimately able to install onto my GPT partition was to use Rufus, which explicitly lets you choose between UEFI and BIOS when you create the USB. It is amusing that Rufus runs on Windows only (so you need to have Windows to install Windows). Luckily I was able to use the VirtualBox images provided by Microsoft for Microsoft Edge testing to run Rufus and create the USB. Once Windows is installed it's pretty reliable. But it is a nightmare to install.

greyhair 6y ago
Wait, there is an automatic tool to create the USB stick. I use it regularly. I think it is interesting that you can still buy old Windows 7 hardware, and just stick the Windows 10 install USB into it, reboot, and be on your way. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 The second option. Easy as pie.

joshspankit 6y ago

Based on the tone of when it was introduced in the article, I would say that the author means that Windows has a lot of stuff running on a normal install that is unnecessary and entirely fragmented both in location of files and in location of configurations. One thing that keeps me somewhat sane in windows are those heroes who spend hundreds of hours figuring out what each system service does, whether it’s needed, and how to disable it if it’s not.

hastradamus 6y ago

Without first hand macos 'power user' experience I can understand why it might be difficult to wrap your head around. Sometimes things that might take you 5 seconds on Linux take your 8 hours for some reason. Like installing Python. And the. A version changes something and you need to reinstall python but everything is broken and nothing works. And then all of a sudden home brew doesn't work and you need to spend a week researching why and it turns out you need to boot into single user mode and chmod every folder in some directory for everything to work. Pure nightmare