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I’ve said this before on HN, but as a reminder the following are all verifiable facts: there is no dedicated macOS team anymore, Apple market iPads as a superio

by nailer 5y ago

I’ve said this before on HN, but as a reminder the following are all verifiable facts: there is no dedicated macOS team anymore, Apple market iPads as a superior alternative to a laptop, and macOS as a percentage of revenue has over a long period dwindled in favour of iOS (with a few minor blips along the way). A reasonable conclusion is that macOS isn’t apple’s priority. Meanwhile with WSL and Terminal Microsoft is pushing hard at developers. apt get is a better system than home brew and always has been. Vote with your wallets.

tomduncalf 5y ago
The fact that they have invested what must be an astronomical sum in moving Macs over to their own CPU architecture suggests otherwise. It’s probably more fair to say their vision for MacOS doesn’t align with what everyone would like? Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!
- nailer 5y ago
  I think they need a platform for developers and macOS diehards. But fast forward 10 years macOS won’t exist.
  - tomduncalf 5y ago
    You’re probably right, but that won’t happen until we can do all the things we care about on whatever the “one true platform” I don’t think. I believe Apple will always support “power users”, if just because they need to support developers, and their large audience of creatives using their machines.
wwalexander 5y ago
The MacPorts project has existed for 7 years longer than Homebrew, and is a much more sane experience similar to FreeBSD ports. In fact, Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and the original author of FreeBSD ports, was involved in the MacPorts project (along with other Apple employees). I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
- rswail 5y ago
  Second vote for Macports. It's awesome, and filed some bugs during the Big Sur beta, they all got triaged and processed really fast with new package releases only days later.
- mapgrep 5y ago
  Macports is great and better than homebrew. But it’s an add on, with no (official) support from Apple. Apt is first party, WSL is first party. Debian and Microsoft won’t make breaking changes intentionally that impact those systems. This happens regularly with homebrew and Apple. (Macports having a more independent universe in /opt and being less vulnerable to breakage is partly why I prefer it. Although it still takes a dependency on Xcode cli tools last I looked.)
- jtbayly 5y ago
  I tried MacPorts back in the day and royally screwed up my computer and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Iirc, homebrew symlinking prevents what happened to me. However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
threeseed 5y ago
I am going to assume you are ignorant about Windows 11 then. Because the UI changes they have made there (new Start menu, centred task icons) make the OS look very similar to the so called abandoned macOS.
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  people who make that claim never used macOS for longer than a day windows 11 feels like KDE made by a random tasteless trainee they don't even support tabs on things like File Explorer, you have to swallow that useless and ugly Ribbon interface and their taskbar-dock-wanabee is miles behind the mac's dock and let's not talk about the top menu bar, mac os system tray is far more useful and customizable than the one on windows and let's not talk about the notification center and many more details that make the difference windows still carry multiple generations of UIs, even on Windows 11

by nailer 5y ago

tomduncalf 5y ago

The fact that they have invested what must be an astronomical sum in moving Macs over to their own CPU architecture suggests otherwise. It’s probably more fair to say their vision for MacOS doesn’t align with what everyone would like? Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!

nailer 5y ago
I think they need a platform for developers and macOS diehards. But fast forward 10 years macOS won’t exist.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  You’re probably right, but that won’t happen until we can do all the things we care about on whatever the “one true platform” I don’t think. I believe Apple will always support “power users”, if just because they need to support developers, and their large audience of creatives using their machines.

wwalexander 5y ago

The MacPorts project has existed for 7 years longer than Homebrew, and is a much more sane experience similar to FreeBSD ports. In fact, Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and the original author of FreeBSD ports, was involved in the MacPorts project (along with other Apple employees). I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.

rswail 5y ago
Second vote for Macports. It's awesome, and filed some bugs during the Big Sur beta, they all got triaged and processed really fast with new package releases only days later.
mapgrep 5y ago
Macports is great and better than homebrew. But it’s an add on, with no (official) support from Apple. Apt is first party, WSL is first party. Debian and Microsoft won’t make breaking changes intentionally that impact those systems. This happens regularly with homebrew and Apple. (Macports having a more independent universe in /opt and being less vulnerable to breakage is partly why I prefer it. Although it still takes a dependency on Xcode cli tools last I looked.)
jtbayly 5y ago
I tried MacPorts back in the day and royally screwed up my computer and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Iirc, homebrew symlinking prevents what happened to me. However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.

threeseed 5y ago

I am going to assume you are ignorant about Windows 11 then. Because the UI changes they have made there (new Start menu, centred task icons) make the OS look very similar to the so called abandoned macOS.

Shadonototro 5y ago
people who make that claim never used macOS for longer than a day windows 11 feels like KDE made by a random tasteless trainee they don't even support tabs on things like File Explorer, you have to swallow that useless and ugly Ribbon interface and their taskbar-dock-wanabee is miles behind the mac's dock and let's not talk about the top menu bar, mac os system tray is far more useful and customizable than the one on windows and let's not talk about the notification center and many more details that make the difference windows still carry multiple generations of UIs, even on Windows 11