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I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use
by Tainnor 6y ago
I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit.
For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].
Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).
In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/
- rbanffy 6y ago> I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.
- vetinari 6y agoAnd it still cannot display powerline characters correctly.
- rbanffy 6y agoI think it depends on a font supporting them correctly. I’m using a zsh prompt that uses them and it seems normal. Check https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font and let me know if it helps. I was thinking of adding the powerline symbols to the test renderings.
- vetinari 6y agoThe problem is not with font glyphs, but with colors. Background and foreground colors that should be the same aren't, they are different shades, thus some themes (such as powelevel9k/powerlevek10k) appear broken, see https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu And the line height -- it could be font, it could be terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline).
- rbanffy 6y agoTerminal allows fine tuning the spacing. I tried to optimise my font to look good on the default settings, but that doesn’t always work and never works for every program.
- yen223 6y ago> most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed. I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?
- Tainnor 6y agoiTerm is certainly good, but I was comparing it more to Terminal.app for my needs, gnome-terminal seems to be enough, although it might not have all the features that iTerm has
- lhl 6y agoI tried a bunch of terminals and ended up switching from urxvt to termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite a few years back (mainly for it's better handling for refreshing certain curses style output). This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros and cons between some of the different options: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/ https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/