7 ms·

Dont' forget: - Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts - A package manager with up to date packages (granted

Dont' forget: - Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts - A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) - Applications that have a consistent UI/UX and all use the same keyboard shortcuts > All the customization doesn't offset the trouble that desktop Linux can bring. It's nice you can customize almost everything on Linux, but most of the time I feel I must customize everything to get to a basic standard.

__jem 5y ago
> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Agree as a Mac user. I miss pacman from Arch. Now -that- is a nice package manager. It took the best (simple) parts from Gentoo and combined them with the better parts of apt/rpm/zypp etc.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I always found pacman a little weird to use, but I think that was more a function of its UI -- its commands and options just weren't easily memorable for me, and I had to look them up almost every time. Its actual functionality was great, though.
  - lloeki 5y ago
    So WDYT of this? https://www.archmac.org/ https://www.archmac.org/ (But please read this) https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.html https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.htm...
- irateswami 5y ago
  Homebrew is more transparent and approachable, I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt. Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version of whatever software packages I'm trying to install. I end up just having to adding various libraries and repos to my sources list to get the version I need, or go to an outside dependency manager like gvm, sdkman, etc which is basically homebrew anyway. Homebrew is for devs that need to get shit done, apt is for computer scientists that love the tool more than solving problems with a tool. For the record, I'm on both linux and mac and there's plenty of upside and downside to both.
  - regularfry 5y ago
    More accurate to say that apt is for the sysadmin, perhaps.
  - cookiengineer 5y ago
    You're extrapolating from Debian's packaging concept to other distros, though your argument does not apply to most of the rolling distros out there. On a rolling distro (e.g. using pacman, or say yast2 and others for sake of argument) you typically ship the header files included with the libraries, so that you don't need multiple versions of the same library installed. On Debian/Ubuntu, however, it will always end up with that mess of dozens of versions of the same library because all PPAs are somewhat outdated and used different versions of specific libraries once they were published.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      That's the problem isn't it? Whichever problem you point at in Linux, the answer is invariably the same: "you're holding it wr^W^W^^W you're using the wrong distro, the wrong package manager, the wrong DE, the wrong version of any of those things". And, invariably, for any problem the one true combination is different.
      - mixedCase 5y ago
        And that's why forks suck and everyone should use a spork. Having options that cater to different usecases is confusing. You don't really need to take big bites anyway.
- moshmosh 5y ago
  Homebrew's very up to date, without that cutting-edge quality risking system stability (since that's totally separate) and has an incredible number of supported packages, including tons of closed-source stuff, out of the box. No hunting down PPAs or obscure unofficial back-port packages or anything. The only Linux package managers I've seen even approach it (not match, but approach) are from bleeding-edge distros like Arch or Gentoo, but those come at a harsh stability cost since they also manage the rest of your system, including all the shared libs (ugh) and system-level packages (I gather that's the case on Arch, it sure was on Gentoo when I used it for many years, mostly because I loved Portage and OpenRC)
  - sagarm 5y ago
    Some of this is a matter of taste, clearly. I strongly prefer having my system packages being rock solid; I can always fetch updated software for the very few cases where I want that. However, my aversion to homebrew goes beyond taste: my experience with homebrew is rife with breakages. To be fair we were trying to use it in a CI system, which will very quickly reveal a buggy system. By contrast, apt/dnf are rock solid when used in CI. An actual example: we tried providing our own recipe to install a particular version of libicu. This triggered an upgrade of some dependency; that triggered an upgrade of libicu to a different version than 68. The command exited with a successful status. A real package manager would have detected the package conflict and reported it, giving you resolution options, or errored out in a non-interactive terminal. Why were we trying to pin versions in the first place? You guessed it, package breakages.
    - moshmosh 5y ago
      Yeah, I don't manage dev dependencies for projects in home-brew, just software for which I am a mere user. I probably wouldn't use apt and friends for those, either—not directly on my workstation anyway, maybe in some pinned-OS-version VM—unless my workstation happened to be identical to my deploy target and was guaranteed to stay that way. For a macOS build for C or C++ or anything along those lines, I'd probably vendor dependencies.
  - soraminazuki 5y ago
- bassdropvroom 5y ago
  On the planet that runs arbitrary community maintained Ruby scripts to install packages, and the planet where doing brew update requires a full days work + max CPU usage.
- lloeki 5y ago
  It isn't, but there's MacPorts, nixpkgs, pkgsrc, and ArchMac (although I kinda dropped the ball on the latter)
kelnos 5y ago
> It's nice you can customize almost everything on Linux, but most of the time I feel I must customize everything to get to a basic standard. The last time I had to customize everything was like 10 years ago, and now I just copy my $HOME from machine to machine when I get a new one and everything just works and looks like it did on my previous machine.
waiseristy 5y ago
> Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts What's funny, is this is the complete opposite experience that I had in every single way. Multi-monitors absolutely suck on macos unless you drop $1000 on mac monitors Try running two external monitors with differing resolutions, in my experience, it will be stable about 1 time out of 20. The rest will have artifacting, refusal to recognize the monitor, or other weird behaviour. Or try running a monitor that isn't at least 4k, the most recent macos removed text aliasing so text rendering on 1080/1440p monitors looks like something out of the 1980's. Linux though? I've never once had an issue with external monitors using Ubuntu Edit: Sitting here on my work mac, almost forgot about my favorite one! When running multiple monitor resolutions, mouse movement hitches and lags for seemingly no reason! Only a disconnect and reconnect of the external monitors fixes it!
- xodice 5y ago
  Meanwhile I use both a 1080p display and a 1440p display (Both Dell displays) with zero issues on macOS Big Sur. I get no odd behavior, both monitors are always detected nor do I see artifacting or anything other issue. There was some minor pink lines on the boot up screen that have since been fixed in the latest release. (M1 Mac mini) I can't really say I noticed a difference personally since they removed text aliasing on 1440p or lower, however it's a single toggle to turn back on. I get zero mouse lag with differing resolutions and I use both a Magic Mouse 2 and a Magic Touchpad 2. anecdotes are always going to differ.
  - waiseristy 5y ago
    Might be a difference between the Intel and M1 macs
TwoNineA 5y ago
> Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts My M1 mini has all kinds of issues with 2 4k monitors attached. Sometimes waking up from sleep, the monitor plugged into TB scales to default setting (200%?) instead my config (125%). And don't get me started on Ultra Wide support.
- X-Istence 5y ago
  I’ve got a 49 inch ultra wide connected to my MacBook Pro using a Belkin Thunderbolt dock… what about ultra wide support?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sagarm 5y ago
You can't even change the subpixel rendering to BGR on a Mac! The suggested solution is, literally, to flip your monitor upside down.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Mac OS removed supixel rendering AFAIK
dchackernew 5y ago
"- Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts" Unless you want to use two TypeC->DP connected monitors using MST. For "reasons" ($$$), Apple arbitrarily decided to not support MST over TypeC connectors (thunder bolt good, TypeC bad!!). And since this is MacOS, its impossible to ever have that support unless it was blessed upon us by the overlords. I don't like being held hostage by a company, and Apple is great at setting their way or the highway (some may like that, but not I). When I got my new job and they forced MacOS on me: Ok, now I need a usable home setup. Lets try to get this running without running to buy $4k in new monitors.. days searching and a few wasted purchases later, everything worked fine just to discover that Apple refuses TypeC MST for no specific reason. So by all means, you can keep it. I'll hold my nose because I like my company, but their choice to mandate this hardware was awful.

__jem 5y ago

> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.

jpgvm 5y ago
Agree as a Mac user. I miss pacman from Arch. Now -that- is a nice package manager. It took the best (simple) parts from Gentoo and combined them with the better parts of apt/rpm/zypp etc.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I always found pacman a little weird to use, but I think that was more a function of its UI -- its commands and options just weren't easily memorable for me, and I had to look them up almost every time. Its actual functionality was great, though.
- lloeki 5y ago
  So WDYT of this? https://www.archmac.org/ https://www.archmac.org/ (But please read this) https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.html https://lna7n.org/2020/01/06/pulling-the-plug-on-archmac.htm...
irateswami 5y ago
Homebrew is more transparent and approachable, I can easily customize what is being installed, it's versioning, and control it's dependencies better than apt. Apt, more often than not, acts as a gatekeeper for the latest version of whatever software packages I'm trying to install. I end up just having to adding various libraries and repos to my sources list to get the version I need, or go to an outside dependency manager like gvm, sdkman, etc which is basically homebrew anyway. Homebrew is for devs that need to get shit done, apt is for computer scientists that love the tool more than solving problems with a tool. For the record, I'm on both linux and mac and there's plenty of upside and downside to both.
- regularfry 5y ago
  More accurate to say that apt is for the sysadmin, perhaps.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  You're extrapolating from Debian's packaging concept to other distros, though your argument does not apply to most of the rolling distros out there. On a rolling distro (e.g. using pacman, or say yast2 and others for sake of argument) you typically ship the header files included with the libraries, so that you don't need multiple versions of the same library installed. On Debian/Ubuntu, however, it will always end up with that mess of dozens of versions of the same library because all PPAs are somewhat outdated and used different versions of specific libraries once they were published.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    That's the problem isn't it? Whichever problem you point at in Linux, the answer is invariably the same: "you're holding it wr^W^W^^W you're using the wrong distro, the wrong package manager, the wrong DE, the wrong version of any of those things". And, invariably, for any problem the one true combination is different.
    - mixedCase 5y ago
      And that's why forks suck and everyone should use a spork. Having options that cater to different usecases is confusing. You don't really need to take big bites anyway.
moshmosh 5y ago
Homebrew's very up to date, without that cutting-edge quality risking system stability (since that's totally separate) and has an incredible number of supported packages, including tons of closed-source stuff, out of the box. No hunting down PPAs or obscure unofficial back-port packages or anything. The only Linux package managers I've seen even approach it (not match, but approach) are from bleeding-edge distros like Arch or Gentoo, but those come at a harsh stability cost since they also manage the rest of your system, including all the shared libs (ugh) and system-level packages (I gather that's the case on Arch, it sure was on Gentoo when I used it for many years, mostly because I loved Portage and OpenRC)
- sagarm 5y ago
  Some of this is a matter of taste, clearly. I strongly prefer having my system packages being rock solid; I can always fetch updated software for the very few cases where I want that. However, my aversion to homebrew goes beyond taste: my experience with homebrew is rife with breakages. To be fair we were trying to use it in a CI system, which will very quickly reveal a buggy system. By contrast, apt/dnf are rock solid when used in CI. An actual example: we tried providing our own recipe to install a particular version of libicu. This triggered an upgrade of some dependency; that triggered an upgrade of libicu to a different version than 68. The command exited with a successful status. A real package manager would have detected the package conflict and reported it, giving you resolution options, or errored out in a non-interactive terminal. Why were we trying to pin versions in the first place? You guessed it, package breakages.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't manage dev dependencies for projects in home-brew, just software for which I am a mere user. I probably wouldn't use apt and friends for those, either—not directly on my workstation anyway, maybe in some pinned-OS-version VM—unless my workstation happened to be identical to my deploy target and was guaranteed to stay that way. For a macOS build for C or C++ or anything along those lines, I'd probably vendor dependencies.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
bassdropvroom 5y ago
On the planet that runs arbitrary community maintained Ruby scripts to install packages, and the planet where doing brew update requires a full days work + max CPU usage.
lloeki 5y ago
It isn't, but there's MacPorts, nixpkgs, pkgsrc, and ArchMac (although I kinda dropped the ball on the latter)

kelnos 5y ago

> It's nice you can customize almost everything on Linux, but most of the time I feel I must customize everything to get to a basic standard. The last time I had to customize everything was like 10 years ago, and now I just copy my $HOME from machine to machine when I get a new one and everything just works and looks like it did on my previous machine.

waiseristy 5y ago

> Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts What's funny, is this is the complete opposite experience that I had in every single way. Multi-monitors absolutely suck on macos unless you drop $1000 on mac monitors Try running two external monitors with differing resolutions, in my experience, it will be stable about 1 time out of 20. The rest will have artifacting, refusal to recognize the monitor, or other weird behaviour. Or try running a monitor that isn't at least 4k, the most recent macos removed text aliasing so text rendering on 1080/1440p monitors looks like something out of the 1980's. Linux though? I've never once had an issue with external monitors using Ubuntu Edit: Sitting here on my work mac, almost forgot about my favorite one! When running multiple monitor resolutions, mouse movement hitches and lags for seemingly no reason! Only a disconnect and reconnect of the external monitors fixes it!

xodice 5y ago
Meanwhile I use both a 1080p display and a 1440p display (Both Dell displays) with zero issues on macOS Big Sur. I get no odd behavior, both monitors are always detected nor do I see artifacting or anything other issue. There was some minor pink lines on the boot up screen that have since been fixed in the latest release. (M1 Mac mini) I can't really say I noticed a difference personally since they removed text aliasing on 1440p or lower, however it's a single toggle to turn back on. I get zero mouse lag with differing resolutions and I use both a Magic Mouse 2 and a Magic Touchpad 2. anecdotes are always going to differ.
- waiseristy 5y ago
  Might be a difference between the Intel and M1 macs

TwoNineA 5y ago

> Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts My M1 mini has all kinds of issues with 2 4k monitors attached. Sometimes waking up from sleep, the monitor plugged into TB scales to default setting (200%?) instead my config (125%). And don't get me started on Ultra Wide support.

X-Istence 5y ago
I’ve got a 49 inch ultra wide connected to my MacBook Pro using a Belkin Thunderbolt dock… what about ultra wide support?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

sagarm 5y ago

You can't even change the subpixel rendering to BGR on a Mac! The suggested solution is, literally, to flip your monitor upside down.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Mac OS removed supixel rendering AFAIK

dchackernew 5y ago

"- Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts" Unless you want to use two TypeC->DP connected monitors using MST. For "reasons" ($$$), Apple arbitrarily decided to not support MST over TypeC connectors (thunder bolt good, TypeC bad!!). And since this is MacOS, its impossible to ever have that support unless it was blessed upon us by the overlords. I don't like being held hostage by a company, and Apple is great at setting their way or the highway (some may like that, but not I). When I got my new job and they forced MacOS on me: Ok, now I need a usable home setup. Lets try to get this running without running to buy $4k in new monitors.. days searching and a few wasted purchases later, everything worked fine just to discover that Apple refuses TypeC MST for no specific reason. So by all means, you can keep it. I'll hold my nose because I like my company, but their choice to mandate this hardware was awful.