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Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple, I think I'll chime in with

by nvella 5y ago

Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple, I think I'll chime in with my two cents. I switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. I often dock between standard-DPI displays and portable mode (with the high-DPI/'retina' display.) I first noticed that Windows doesn't correctly handle DPI switching with window borders, Explorer, and notifications back in 2019 (the old 2x scaling level remains when switching from portable to docked), and filed a feedback with the built-in app on Windows. I worked around this by killing dwm.exe and explorer.exe every time I docked my Surface. This issue was still present earlier this year, and deciding I had enough of dealing with all these little Windows 'quirks', wherever they arose, I switched back to my old Mac. It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. Since switching back, I've discovered a lot of quality native apps that simply have no analog on Windows–OmniFocus stands out here. And as always, Homebrew still exists and works just as well as it always has for most of my *nix related tasks. Hearing about the M1 performance improvements, I can see myself staying on Mac for quite some time yet–I'll upgrade to an M1 MacBook Air once this 2015 MBP (six years old!) kicks the bucket. Edit: For some context, I'm mainly a .NET developer. .NET Core/5 is a game-changer for cross-platform and development is first class on really any system nowadays. I've settled on JetBrains Rider for my IDE and find myself generally happier than I was with VS on Windows.

shkkmo 5y ago
Switching to windows and expecting an improvement from MacOS is silly. I switched to Linux from MacOs in 2015 and never looked back. I cam dual boot into Windows, but do so less than once a year these days.
zepto 5y ago
I’ve made a serious effort to switch away - using a retina Mac pro with Ubuntu, and a bunch of raspberry PIs. I love Linux, and I love the PIs, but it can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop. When a pro level M1 or M2 iMac is released, I will be moving back.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > i can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop Then don't. Linux has hundreds of alternative desktops that you can install and try out in minutes. KDE, i3, Awesome, bspwm, Openbox and many many more are all at your fingertips.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I have experimented with this stuff for decades. It’s all frankly half baked and clunky, and the time investment in configuration is insane. Yes, you can find individual features that are better than MacOS spread across them, but you can’t get good design, aesthetics and features in any single one of them. You can certainly get by with it, but why would I want to just ‘get by’?
    - ficklepoet 5y ago
      It's a two way street. Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, or "get by" without 32-bit libraries, or "get by" without a functional graphics API? I'm the user: the choice should be mine. If Apple doesn't present that choice, I don't consider Apple an option. Simple as that. As a developer, these points are non-negotiable. Apple has built computers for 30 years now, they should be well aware of that.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, You don’t have to on MacOS. > or "get by" without 32-bit libraries Why would you want 32 bit libraries? 32-bit support was also ditched in popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat) in the same year as MacOS. > or "get by" without a functional graphics API? To claim there is no functional graphics API on MacOS is utterly absurd.
    - hughrr 5y ago
      Oh yes so much this. 20 years here being told that today is the day of Linux on the desktop. Like hell. Apple stuff is consistently good. It's not perfect but there's not really anything that kicks you in the balls every day to the point it makes you want to burn all your technology and live in the woods. About 5 minutes with any recently Gnome release on a Linux laptop makes me want to do that. Linux is always 50% done. That last 30% to get it to Apple's 80% done is boring so they just rewrite everything again or fork some new clothes for the emperor. The worst experience is windows. There's several layers and each one gets to about 33% done and is replaced with a new one. All the old layers sit there like rings in a tree, occasionally having to be gouged out to fix an obscure issue.
mciancia 5y ago
It's funny that it has been around 9 years now since Apple introduced retina macbooks and their implementation of HiDPI is good from the start but, while it's getting better, windows and linux still need to catch up.
- pavlov 5y ago
  It’s because Apple was very forward-looking in 1999 and decided to use floating point coordinates for the CoreGraphics API. Nothing on the Mac draws using exact integer pixels (since the death of the transitional Carbon API anyway). Scaling was built in from scratch.
  - dTal 5y ago
    What exactly is wrong with "scaling" on Linux? I use Qt apps on Plasma and everything just works. Nearly all my displays are HiDPI now.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      > Nearly all my displays are HiDPI now. Well, that's the whole thing. HiDPI in and of itself works well. I use it with a 24" UHD monitor and I absolutely love the setup. But the main issue with Linux, at least with X11, is that it doesn't handle multiple displays with different DPI settings. As you noted, QT seems to work fine, as do some other toolkits that have dynamic scaling according to the monitor size. Alacritty does this too, for example (don't know what toolkit they use, though). But GTK in particular is terrible. Yes, you can configure it to use scaling, in which case it works well, IF you don't need fractional scaling (though recent versions of Gnome seem to support it somehow). But now, if you're going to use, say, a HiDPI laptop with a "regular", larger external monitor, you're gonna have a bad time. If you enable scaling, the widgets will be huge on the LoDPI display. If you disable it, widgets will be teeny tiny on the HiDPI one.
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        Note that the problem isn't really with X11 (or at least Xorg) since it does provide the necessary information via RandR to perform per-monitor scaling. The issue is really with window managers and toolkits. What needs to happen is that window managers ask the applications (the top level windows really) to scale themselves -this can be done not just for DPI purposes- and then the applications should apply that scaling. (applications should expose that they can support this - like they expose that they support handling a 'close window' event - so that compositing window managers can do it themselves for applications that do not support it, which is also why this needs to go through the window manager) Qt can do this but AFAIK window managers do not do this because there isn't any standard events for that - i remember an email about this exact topic when i took a look at the Xorg mailing list for WMs some time ago, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere (in that it barely had any replies). So it really is about standardizing how it is to be done. I think the main reason it isn't done is that such setups are comparably rare (i mean hidpi displays themselves are very rare - if you check any desktop resolution stats they often barely are a blip - and having both a hidpi display and a regular dpi one is even less common than that) so developers aren't that interested in implementing such a thing. One way it could be done however is also pushing the idea that this isn't just for multimonitor setups: as i wrote above, you can use that for generic scaling, which is useful even for single monitor regular dpi setups (if anything it can be very useful for low resolution setups - like 1366x768 and similar which are way more common than hidpi - when faced with applications with a lot of padding, etc).
minimaul 5y ago
Rider and .NET Core aren’t native yet on M1 - but .NET 6 fixes this :)
peterburkimsher 5y ago
I'm glad that your MacBook Pro didn't get bricked by the Big Sur update! I heard that there was some issue with the HDMI port firmware, so haven't updated my 2014 MBP. I have had major issues with trying to replace the battery. Beware of third-party replacements, which idle at 12V. The original battery idles at 2.2V and "wakes up". A voltage spike when waking from battery killed my logic board, and 3 professionals have failed to repair it so far. I've spent over NZ$1900 on 5 replacement batteries to try to get something that works, since September 2020. I just want a laptop that I can use on the bus, with a removable SSD so I won't lose my data when it breaks, and iTunes so I can sync my iPod and iPhone.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  The music app in Big Sur still supports syncing to old iPods, I used it with an old 30-pin pre-video iPod nano that I found in a thrift store. It could even properly reformat it from windows FAT32 to Mac HFS format
- Joeri 5y ago
  Instead of looking for a removable SSD consider setting up some kind of syncing and backup solution. A removable ssd doesn’t protect you from theft or ransomware. I use a combination of time machine, backblaze and syncthing to make sure all my data is synced across my machines and backed up locally and in the cloud.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    A removable SSD does ensure that my laptop doesn't become trash after I use it long enough. For many people (myself included) no computer can truly feel "perfect" unless it can be run in relative perpetuity.
  - peterburkimsher 5y ago
    I also use Time Machine to an external drive. 4TB Sabrent Rocket M.2 SSDs with adaptors don't come cheap. Getting that much storage soldered onto the logic board is even more expensive.
tomxor 5y ago
> how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple [...] To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. This feels like a bit of a false dichotomy, WSL isn't the only alternative. We are so very far from limited to windows vs mac for desktop today, it's easier than ever to use Linux or even a BSD as a daily driver on a PC laptop. Even the article in 2005 noted hackers switching to intel boxes (not mac intel boxes) for FreeBSD and Linux at the time.
- swiley 5y ago
  When Lion came out I switched to Debian after it corrupted the rootfs twice. Installation my MBP was pretty easy.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    Same here, 10.6 was my last MacOS, it felt like it lost direction and focus after that. For a 2009 MBP it was a nice experience trying out FreeBSD and various linux distros before settling on Debian. The only stumbling block on that machine was the macEFI, which there were eventually plenty of solutions for - I hear the later machines are a bit of a nightmare to run anything other than MacOS though.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Well, if you are self-employed maybe. Or for your own personal home machines, sure. But most employers with IT departments wouldn't be too happy if you had a "nonstandard" OS on your work machine because they wouldn't know how to secure it. Heck, many of them don't even allow Macs.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    I know what you mean, and that is probably still true for the majority, for the US at least, and in large corporations, but I think the world is changing. Linux is the standard OS at my work. We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... it's even started to be used by some of the non-devs to reduce windows/mac update fatigue and general performance issues even though they only need office apps... I'm at a small company but I know of other large companies with big IT depts applying the "locked down OS image" approach to Linux for desktop too. I find the concept of "windows" as the only safe OS image IT depts are willing to use, as fairly antiquated. Much like IE used to be the only browser you were allowed to use in many big old corps and gov agencies for "security" reasons. Although this is an aside, the original context of the article was only "hackers" machines, and whatever your interpretation of that is, it probably doesn't involve fortune 500s.
Causality1 5y ago
Windows has a particular knack for giving the user the impression it doesn't care about them at all. The things that irritate me now are the same things that irritated me last year, five years ago, and in a few cases twenty years ago. They make you go "Jesus is everybody asleep over there?" For example, if you want a notification icon to always be shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit "show icon and notifications". Why can't you just right click an icon and hit "show icon and notifications"? Because Windows doesn't give a shit about you.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  The insanely deep nesting of little configuration windows is probably the number one thing that makes Windows feel old to me. The new settings app is an improvement, but sadly one that lives in isolation.
  - herbst 5y ago
    Or the point that many of these configurations can ONLY be accessed by GUI. That's one thing that makes windows (and even MacOS to some degree) so awkward to use sometimes.
    - aikinai 5y ago
      Almost every setting in MacOS can be accessed by the command line, and many things only there. Actually I don’t think I’ve found anything so far that can’t be set from the command line and I do a fair amount of that kind of tweaking.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Xcode license agreements? Took me literally more than a hour the first time I installed something on the terminal but refused to finish because I never heard of xcode or that you need to open it manually in order to confirm a license agreement. When I was just installing the ruby stack and it needed some compilers via xcode I guess? That was on a MBP like 2015 or so. The error message was not helpful at all, I had to ask someone with experience or I would still be installing ruby to this day. (Given I don't remember anything else)
Chazprime 5y ago
> The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. That’s the thing with some people and Apple; I generally moan whenever Apple changes their UI substantially (the change to the “flat” iOS comes to mind first), but soon I come to wonder how I ever liked anything else. :)
- bombcar 5y ago
  They also (intentionally or not) make many of the changes “reversible” with tweaks and other programs. This allows the people who have a visceral reaction to revert and usually over time it softens, and then you find yourself not bothering with it. The biggest change for me was the switch to zsh which ended up in me changing my default shell everywhere else.
smoldesu 5y ago
This is why Linux exists. I was pretty disappointed by the compatibility/performance of the M1, so I switched back to my desktop with Manjaro Linux installed on it. Suffice to say, I doubt I'll be using my Macbook unless Apple revives 32-bit libraries or switches back to x86 in some capacity.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. They can also both be turned off! Gatekeeper in 30 seconds and SIP in less than five minutes. I legitimately understand why people get worked up about optional features.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  Any problem I've had in Linux was fixed in 5 minutes too. There are too many things in macOS which can't be fixed. You can't even change the color of your mouse pointer if you want to.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    ...actually, if SIP is off, you can, they're just PDF files! But yes it's certainly not a real feature! /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources
seltzered_ 5y ago
"switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain." I had a similar feeling when given a new windows laptop in 2020 to work with that was supposedly better spec'ed than my late 2013 macbook 15". The problem has been windows and the lack of finding flow in it's OS. I've been trying to document workflows & apps here for the past year to see if alternatives are emerging: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3mF-c4vqV3CqyEWXuqaAiXoA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3... . For me it's not so much the development environment but whether I can quickly deal with administrivia tasks (organizing files, copying things from one form to another, etc.). I'm surprised windows 11 still lacks miller columns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns My concern about the apple platform going forward isn't so much about the technical, but the material - my 2013-era macbook died recently and found the fact that I could remove the ssd and plug it into a similarly old mac to still be a savior , despite having multiple backups. It's driven me to consider installing linux on an intel windows tablet over buying an M1 macbook - I'm getting leary of both the lack of repairability and really wanting a tablet on stand + detached keyboard/trackpad for sake of ergonomics.
orf 5y ago
> It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once Woah, even after the “it’s literally 1984” hacker-news groupthink? You’re telling me they might have massively inflated perceived issues without even trying them? No way. Never.
bsharitt 5y ago
Years ago I started using Macs to have a stable Unix desktop that also played well with commercial software while keeping Linux on the side as a hobby. Somewhere around 2010 or so I think finally switched away from Macs to pure Linux after my Mac that worked just fine was dropped from support of the latest version of OS X and by that point Linux on the desktop seemed far more stable and I was working with it much more professionally any way. Linux started getting really good as a desktop OS and I think it peaked for me around Ubuntu 16.04 and got very much to a "just works" state that I enjoyed with Macs and Steam was on Linux along with a handful of games I cared about(mostly Civ 5). Then a weird thing started happening and new updates on the same hardware started having weird issues on my laptop, mostly around sleep and power saving. It was possible to fix most of the issues, but the brief "just works" periods seemed to be over. It was still mostly fine on my desktop, and even improved when Valve launched Proton. Eventually I used my Linux desktop mostly and later my Linux laptop went away in favor of a Chromebook, which supported their beta Linux environment. It wasn't perfect, but sleep/suspend worked and I could do most "Linux" things I needed to do. I also started using a Macbook Pro at work again after being off of OS X for 5 or 6 years and it was just a reminder to me that a Unix-like desktop that didn't need as much fiddling around existed(of course some of you may point out that the fiddling is more restricted on OS X, which is a fair point as well), but the thermal issues of the later Intel Macbooks kept me from buying one for personal use. So fast forward to last year. I was moving and some other stuff was in flux and my already long in the tooth desktop needed to be put away for a while and while my Chromebook was useful, I didn't like relying on it as a primary machine. Since I didn't play too many demanding games anymore I thought this would be a good chance to kill two birds with one stone and get a laptop that capable playing the meager game library I had, which meant mostly better integrated graphics rather than discrete, and since it was before Intel Xe came out, a Ryzen 4000 series CPU seemed like the obvious choice with a GPU that was roughly GTX 1050ti class, just enough for me. Sadly it appears that AMD pushed forward with some new kind of "hybrid sleep" or what ever they're calling it and wast supported by Linux very well at all(I'm not sure of the exact state at the time of writing this, there was some talk of support landing in 5.13, but I'm not sure of that happened or if it got pushed out to 5.14). So I did the Windows thing full time for the first time in a very long time with WSL, which I actually grew to like somewhat, but I still wasn't happy with the laptop. By the end of the end of 2020, Macbooks with the M1 were in the wild and the results seemed very good. And since I was still using a Macbook Pro for work during this time, I still had mostly positive feelings about macOS. It had its peculiarities, but I liked it better than Windows, and required less effort to keep running than Linux, I just didn't like the jet engine that my Macbook turned into when ever I tried to do anything remotely demanding. In fact I've always hated fans, and fan noise was a one of motivating factors in dumping my desktop. My "grail" machine has been a fast laptop with no fans or other moving parts. SSDs have been a thing for a while, but we've not had a rally solid performing fanless machine until the M1 Macbook Air(in the 21st century, I'm not counting the fast for their time fanless machines of the 80s and early 90's). So I felt almost obligated get that machine and that's what I did and haven't regretted it for a second(though ask me again in 4 or 5 years if/when Apple starts dropping support for these first gen ARM devices). It can silently keep up with any work I would do compared to my work 16" Macbook Pro which runs much hotter and louder and so far the M1 Air has been able to do what I've needed it to do.

by nvella 5y ago

shkkmo 5y ago

Switching to windows and expecting an improvement from MacOS is silly. I switched to Linux from MacOs in 2015 and never looked back. I cam dual boot into Windows, but do so less than once a year these days.

zepto 5y ago

I’ve made a serious effort to switch away - using a retina Mac pro with Ubuntu, and a bunch of raspberry PIs. I love Linux, and I love the PIs, but it can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop. When a pro level M1 or M2 iMac is released, I will be moving back.

smoldesu 5y ago
> i can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop Then don't. Linux has hundreds of alternative desktops that you can install and try out in minutes. KDE, i3, Awesome, bspwm, Openbox and many many more are all at your fingertips.
- zepto 5y ago
  I have experimented with this stuff for decades. It’s all frankly half baked and clunky, and the time investment in configuration is insane. Yes, you can find individual features that are better than MacOS spread across them, but you can’t get good design, aesthetics and features in any single one of them. You can certainly get by with it, but why would I want to just ‘get by’?
  - ficklepoet 5y ago
    It's a two way street. Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, or "get by" without 32-bit libraries, or "get by" without a functional graphics API? I'm the user: the choice should be mine. If Apple doesn't present that choice, I don't consider Apple an option. Simple as that. As a developer, these points are non-negotiable. Apple has built computers for 30 years now, they should be well aware of that.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, You don’t have to on MacOS. > or "get by" without 32-bit libraries Why would you want 32 bit libraries? 32-bit support was also ditched in popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat) in the same year as MacOS. > or "get by" without a functional graphics API? To claim there is no functional graphics API on MacOS is utterly absurd.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Oh yes so much this. 20 years here being told that today is the day of Linux on the desktop. Like hell. Apple stuff is consistently good. It's not perfect but there's not really anything that kicks you in the balls every day to the point it makes you want to burn all your technology and live in the woods. About 5 minutes with any recently Gnome release on a Linux laptop makes me want to do that. Linux is always 50% done. That last 30% to get it to Apple's 80% done is boring so they just rewrite everything again or fork some new clothes for the emperor. The worst experience is windows. There's several layers and each one gets to about 33% done and is replaced with a new one. All the old layers sit there like rings in a tree, occasionally having to be gouged out to fix an obscure issue.

mciancia 5y ago

It's funny that it has been around 9 years now since Apple introduced retina macbooks and their implementation of HiDPI is good from the start but, while it's getting better, windows and linux still need to catch up.

pavlov 5y ago
It’s because Apple was very forward-looking in 1999 and decided to use floating point coordinates for the CoreGraphics API. Nothing on the Mac draws using exact integer pixels (since the death of the transitional Carbon API anyway). Scaling was built in from scratch.
- dTal 5y ago
  What exactly is wrong with "scaling" on Linux? I use Qt apps on Plasma and everything just works. Nearly all my displays are HiDPI now.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    > Nearly all my displays are HiDPI now. Well, that's the whole thing. HiDPI in and of itself works well. I use it with a 24" UHD monitor and I absolutely love the setup. But the main issue with Linux, at least with X11, is that it doesn't handle multiple displays with different DPI settings. As you noted, QT seems to work fine, as do some other toolkits that have dynamic scaling according to the monitor size. Alacritty does this too, for example (don't know what toolkit they use, though). But GTK in particular is terrible. Yes, you can configure it to use scaling, in which case it works well, IF you don't need fractional scaling (though recent versions of Gnome seem to support it somehow). But now, if you're going to use, say, a HiDPI laptop with a "regular", larger external monitor, you're gonna have a bad time. If you enable scaling, the widgets will be huge on the LoDPI display. If you disable it, widgets will be teeny tiny on the HiDPI one.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      Note that the problem isn't really with X11 (or at least Xorg) since it does provide the necessary information via RandR to perform per-monitor scaling. The issue is really with window managers and toolkits. What needs to happen is that window managers ask the applications (the top level windows really) to scale themselves -this can be done not just for DPI purposes- and then the applications should apply that scaling. (applications should expose that they can support this - like they expose that they support handling a 'close window' event - so that compositing window managers can do it themselves for applications that do not support it, which is also why this needs to go through the window manager) Qt can do this but AFAIK window managers do not do this because there isn't any standard events for that - i remember an email about this exact topic when i took a look at the Xorg mailing list for WMs some time ago, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere (in that it barely had any replies). So it really is about standardizing how it is to be done. I think the main reason it isn't done is that such setups are comparably rare (i mean hidpi displays themselves are very rare - if you check any desktop resolution stats they often barely are a blip - and having both a hidpi display and a regular dpi one is even less common than that) so developers aren't that interested in implementing such a thing. One way it could be done however is also pushing the idea that this isn't just for multimonitor setups: as i wrote above, you can use that for generic scaling, which is useful even for single monitor regular dpi setups (if anything it can be very useful for low resolution setups - like 1366x768 and similar which are way more common than hidpi - when faced with applications with a lot of padding, etc).

minimaul 5y ago

Rider and .NET Core aren’t native yet on M1 - but .NET 6 fixes this :)

peterburkimsher 5y ago

I'm glad that your MacBook Pro didn't get bricked by the Big Sur update! I heard that there was some issue with the HDMI port firmware, so haven't updated my 2014 MBP. I have had major issues with trying to replace the battery. Beware of third-party replacements, which idle at 12V. The original battery idles at 2.2V and "wakes up". A voltage spike when waking from battery killed my logic board, and 3 professionals have failed to repair it so far. I've spent over NZ$1900 on 5 replacement batteries to try to get something that works, since September 2020. I just want a laptop that I can use on the bus, with a removable SSD so I won't lose my data when it breaks, and iTunes so I can sync my iPod and iPhone.

kalleboo 5y ago
The music app in Big Sur still supports syncing to old iPods, I used it with an old 30-pin pre-video iPod nano that I found in a thrift store. It could even properly reformat it from windows FAT32 to Mac HFS format
Joeri 5y ago
Instead of looking for a removable SSD consider setting up some kind of syncing and backup solution. A removable ssd doesn’t protect you from theft or ransomware. I use a combination of time machine, backblaze and syncthing to make sure all my data is synced across my machines and backed up locally and in the cloud.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  A removable SSD does ensure that my laptop doesn't become trash after I use it long enough. For many people (myself included) no computer can truly feel "perfect" unless it can be run in relative perpetuity.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  I also use Time Machine to an external drive. 4TB Sabrent Rocket M.2 SSDs with adaptors don't come cheap. Getting that much storage soldered onto the logic board is even more expensive.

tomxor 5y ago

> how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple [...] To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. This feels like a bit of a false dichotomy, WSL isn't the only alternative. We are so very far from limited to windows vs mac for desktop today, it's easier than ever to use Linux or even a BSD as a daily driver on a PC laptop. Even the article in 2005 noted hackers switching to intel boxes (not mac intel boxes) for FreeBSD and Linux at the time.

swiley 5y ago
When Lion came out I switched to Debian after it corrupted the rootfs twice. Installation my MBP was pretty easy.
- tomxor 5y ago
  Same here, 10.6 was my last MacOS, it felt like it lost direction and focus after that. For a 2009 MBP it was a nice experience trying out FreeBSD and various linux distros before settling on Debian. The only stumbling block on that machine was the macEFI, which there were eventually plenty of solutions for - I hear the later machines are a bit of a nightmare to run anything other than MacOS though.
jhbadger 5y ago
Well, if you are self-employed maybe. Or for your own personal home machines, sure. But most employers with IT departments wouldn't be too happy if you had a "nonstandard" OS on your work machine because they wouldn't know how to secure it. Heck, many of them don't even allow Macs.
- tomxor 5y ago
  I know what you mean, and that is probably still true for the majority, for the US at least, and in large corporations, but I think the world is changing. Linux is the standard OS at my work. We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... it's even started to be used by some of the non-devs to reduce windows/mac update fatigue and general performance issues even though they only need office apps... I'm at a small company but I know of other large companies with big IT depts applying the "locked down OS image" approach to Linux for desktop too. I find the concept of "windows" as the only safe OS image IT depts are willing to use, as fairly antiquated. Much like IE used to be the only browser you were allowed to use in many big old corps and gov agencies for "security" reasons. Although this is an aside, the original context of the article was only "hackers" machines, and whatever your interpretation of that is, it probably doesn't involve fortune 500s.

Causality1 5y ago

Windows has a particular knack for giving the user the impression it doesn't care about them at all. The things that irritate me now are the same things that irritated me last year, five years ago, and in a few cases twenty years ago. They make you go "Jesus is everybody asleep over there?" For example, if you want a notification icon to always be shown, you have to open a menu, open another menu, scroll to find the one you want, open an option list, and finally hit "show icon and notifications". Why can't you just right click an icon and hit "show icon and notifications"? Because Windows doesn't give a shit about you.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
The insanely deep nesting of little configuration windows is probably the number one thing that makes Windows feel old to me. The new settings app is an improvement, but sadly one that lives in isolation.
- herbst 5y ago
  Or the point that many of these configurations can ONLY be accessed by GUI. That's one thing that makes windows (and even MacOS to some degree) so awkward to use sometimes.
  - aikinai 5y ago
    Almost every setting in MacOS can be accessed by the command line, and many things only there. Actually I don’t think I’ve found anything so far that can’t be set from the command line and I do a fair amount of that kind of tweaking.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Xcode license agreements? Took me literally more than a hour the first time I installed something on the terminal but refused to finish because I never heard of xcode or that you need to open it manually in order to confirm a license agreement. When I was just installing the ruby stack and it needed some compilers via xcode I guess? That was on a MBP like 2015 or so. The error message was not helpful at all, I had to ask someone with experience or I would still be installing ruby to this day. (Given I don't remember anything else)

Chazprime 5y ago

> The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. That’s the thing with some people and Apple; I generally moan whenever Apple changes their UI substantially (the change to the “flat” iOS comes to mind first), but soon I come to wonder how I ever liked anything else. :)

bombcar 5y ago
They also (intentionally or not) make many of the changes “reversible” with tweaks and other programs. This allows the people who have a visceral reaction to revert and usually over time it softens, and then you find yourself not bothering with it. The biggest change for me was the switch to zsh which ended up in me changing my default shell everywhere else.

smoldesu 5y ago

This is why Linux exists. I was pretty disappointed by the compatibility/performance of the M1, so I switched back to my desktop with Manjaro Linux installed on it. Suffice to say, I doubt I'll be using my Macbook unless Apple revives 32-bit libraries or switches back to x86 in some capacity.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. They can also both be turned off! Gatekeeper in 30 seconds and SIP in less than five minutes. I legitimately understand why people get worked up about optional features.

wayneftw 5y ago
Any problem I've had in Linux was fixed in 5 minutes too. There are too many things in macOS which can't be fixed. You can't even change the color of your mouse pointer if you want to.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  ...actually, if SIP is off, you can, they're just PDF files! But yes it's certainly not a real feature! /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources

seltzered_ 5y ago

"switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain." I had a similar feeling when given a new windows laptop in 2020 to work with that was supposedly better spec'ed than my late 2013 macbook 15". The problem has been windows and the lack of finding flow in it's OS. I've been trying to document workflows & apps here for the past year to see if alternatives are emerging: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3mF-c4vqV3CqyEWXuqaAiXoA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3... . For me it's not so much the development environment but whether I can quickly deal with administrivia tasks (organizing files, copying things from one form to another, etc.). I'm surprised windows 11 still lacks miller columns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns My concern about the apple platform going forward isn't so much about the technical, but the material - my 2013-era macbook died recently and found the fact that I could remove the ssd and plug it into a similarly old mac to still be a savior , despite having multiple backups. It's driven me to consider installing linux on an intel windows tablet over buying an M1 macbook - I'm getting leary of both the lack of repairability and really wanting a tablet on stand + detached keyboard/trackpad for sake of ergonomics.

orf 5y ago

> It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once Woah, even after the “it’s literally 1984” hacker-news groupthink? You’re telling me they might have massively inflated perceived issues without even trying them? No way. Never.

bsharitt 5y ago

Years ago I started using Macs to have a stable Unix desktop that also played well with commercial software while keeping Linux on the side as a hobby. Somewhere around 2010 or so I think finally switched away from Macs to pure Linux after my Mac that worked just fine was dropped from support of the latest version of OS X and by that point Linux on the desktop seemed far more stable and I was working with it much more professionally any way. Linux started getting really good as a desktop OS and I think it peaked for me around Ubuntu 16.04 and got very much to a "just works" state that I enjoyed with Macs and Steam was on Linux along with a handful of games I cared about(mostly Civ 5). Then a weird thing started happening and new updates on the same hardware started having weird issues on my laptop, mostly around sleep and power saving. It was possible to fix most of the issues, but the brief "just works" periods seemed to be over. It was still mostly fine on my desktop, and even improved when Valve launched Proton. Eventually I used my Linux desktop mostly and later my Linux laptop went away in favor of a Chromebook, which supported their beta Linux environment. It wasn't perfect, but sleep/suspend worked and I could do most "Linux" things I needed to do. I also started using a Macbook Pro at work again after being off of OS X for 5 or 6 years and it was just a reminder to me that a Unix-like desktop that didn't need as much fiddling around existed(of course some of you may point out that the fiddling is more restricted on OS X, which is a fair point as well), but the thermal issues of the later Intel Macbooks kept me from buying one for personal use. So fast forward to last year. I was moving and some other stuff was in flux and my already long in the tooth desktop needed to be put away for a while and while my Chromebook was useful, I didn't like relying on it as a primary machine. Since I didn't play too many demanding games anymore I thought this would be a good chance to kill two birds with one stone and get a laptop that capable playing the meager game library I had, which meant mostly better integrated graphics rather than discrete, and since it was before Intel Xe came out, a Ryzen 4000 series CPU seemed like the obvious choice with a GPU that was roughly GTX 1050ti class, just enough for me. Sadly it appears that AMD pushed forward with some new kind of "hybrid sleep" or what ever they're calling it and wast supported by Linux very well at all(I'm not sure of the exact state at the time of writing this, there was some talk of support landing in 5.13, but I'm not sure of that happened or if it got pushed out to 5.14). So I did the Windows thing full time for the first time in a very long time with WSL, which I actually grew to like somewhat, but I still wasn't happy with the laptop. By the end of the end of 2020, Macbooks with the M1 were in the wild and the results seemed very good. And since I was still using a Macbook Pro for work during this time, I still had mostly positive feelings about macOS. It had its peculiarities, but I liked it better than Windows, and required less effort to keep running than Linux, I just didn't like the jet engine that my Macbook turned into when ever I tried to do anything remotely demanding. In fact I've always hated fans, and fan noise was a one of motivating factors in dumping my desktop. My "grail" machine has been a fast laptop with no fans or other moving parts. SSDs have been a thing for a while, but we've not had a rally solid performing fanless machine until the M1 Macbook Air(in the 21st century, I'm not counting the fast for their time fanless machines of the 80s and early 90's). So I felt almost obligated get that machine and that's what I did and haven't regretted it for a second(though ask me again in 4 or 5 years if/when Apple starts dropping support for these first gen ARM devices). It can silently keep up with any work I would do compared to my work 16" Macbook Pro which runs much hotter and louder and so far the M1 Air has been able to do what I've needed it to do.