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Yeah, despite all the hype, MacOS is one of the least technically sophisticated operating systems in common use. Their main advantage over other systems is powe
by legalcorrection 4y ago
Yeah, despite all the hype, MacOS is one of the least technically sophisticated operating systems in common use. Their main advantage over other systems is power management, and a large part of that is attributable at least as much to control over the hardware as to technical excellence.
The fanboyism and reality distortion field is very strong. I remember when they came out with timer coalescing and were hyping it as a major accomplishment and selling point. Of course, Windows supported timer coalescing for years before MacOS, but that didn’t stop Jobs from convincing a bunch of developers that this was a novel breakthrough.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoMaybe let's wait until Windows allows scrolling of a non-active window before saying this. Or moving/changing the name of a file while it's open. Or having a slash in a file name.
- tshell 4y agoPretty sure that you can scroll non-active windows. Just tried it to be sure.
- bgroins 4y agoYes, works fine on Windows 11
- iggldiggl 4y agoWindows 10, too. I think it didn't work in Windows 7, though. If my memory is correct, that means that it's not a super-new feature, but still relatively newish.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoWow, didn't realize thank you! I still think being able to move/change the name of a file while it's open is impressive
- smoldesu 4y agoMacOS has really strong userland software, stuff like the Quartz compositor is genuinely quite hard to beat (neither Windows, x11 nor Wayland can live up to it's featureset and stability). However, MacOS as an operating system really is a mess. Especially the XNU kernel, which is still an unbelievable amalgamation of disagreeing technology. Remember, MacOS is not natively a UNIX-certified machine: all of it's UNIX compatibility comes from a BSD-based compatibility layer that hasn't really been changed since the late-90s. Oh, and the coreutils? Notoriously garbage. MacOS ships with all sorts of outdated, downgraded, vulnerable and otherwise broken shell utilities. pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash... hell, even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot. I'll give MacOS credit where credit is due (Apple had good design philosophies in the 2010s), but the actual operating system (see: functional network of software components) is truly awful, arguably just as bad as Windows if not worse. Just about it's only redeeming qualities are the things that Apple didn't make (like pf and process management. If you forced me to pick something that I found impressive, I'd have to choose Grand Central Dispatch, but even that isn't terribly impressive. It's mostly as if some Apple engineers decided to iterate on the fairly lackluster Linux process management. It would have been a miracle if they managed to make something worse.
- jolux 4y ago> even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot Mandatory reboot? I've never experienced that with the Xcode command line tools.
- smoldesu 4y agoI could be wrong, last time I seriously used MacOS (for both personal/work uses) was Mojave. Either way, it's installing a lot more than just the 30mb of the git binary, so I learned my lesson and just installed all the GNU stuff with my package manager. Annoying to be sure, but somehow better than dealing with Apple's default way of handling it.
- jolux 4y ago
- Geezus-42 4y agoAs a Linux user, why would you want a slash in a filename?
- dmd 4y agoBecause a very large fraction of people - greater than 90% - use forward slashes in dates, and people like putting dates in filenames. Nearly all of those people have never seen a filename path written out in text, and wouldn't care if they did.
- sofixa 4y ago> Because a very large fraction of people - greater than 90% - use forward slashes in dates Citation needed
- jen729w 4y agoA forward slash is a very common separator character. I did this myself the other week. Mac user. Folder was called ‘Lessons/episodes’ from memory. I only noticed it was weird when my Synology didn’t display the character. Renamed to ‘Lessons & episodes’.
- sofixa 4y agoIt absolutely is. That doesn't mean that 90% of the world population use forward slashes for dates.
- chefandy 4y agoI think I need to write a plugin that searches the current HN page for terms in a configurable flame fodder string list and adds `opacity: 0.2` to the row. Fanboy would definitely included by default.
- duxup 4y ago> main advantage over other systems is power management I can understand that appeal. In the last 5 years I don’t think I’ve had a windows laptop sleep or hibernate as I would expect, not randomly wake up in the middle of the night, in my bag, and just sit there fans at full speed… I’m tired enough of it to try a Mac…
- viraptor 4y agoSame happens occasionally on my mac. And even if it doesn't stay on, it wakes up often enough to drain >50% overnight. My only machine to reliably sleep, wake up and power manage is Linux.
- beagle3 4y agoDid you turn off "powernap" in settings? By default, a mac would wake up to download mail, run backups, and do other things in the middle of the night.
- viraptor 4y agoYeah, that's with powernap off.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danaris 4y agoI've experienced this with Mac laptops that I've got loads of stuff running on, but not on stock configurations, so I suspect it's some piece of software rudely waking it up every so often for its own inscrutable reasons.
- fortran77 4y agoI bought a high-end lenovo and the fans would turn on and the machine would get hot when it was in my bag. But it's not Microsoft's fault. The Surface Book I replaced it with works perfectly.
- 4y ago
- rileymat2 4y agoThere are some usability affordances in macos that are quite nice. For example something as simple as copy and paste is command-c, everywhere. In Ubuntu? control-c or control-shift-c. It is pretty annoying being in autopilot and killing the command line program you are in because you reflexively hit control-c. Also, readline shortcuts work through out, so control-a will send you to the start of a line. Not with Ubuntu.
- stenius 4y agoThe Linux way is to copy text anywhere just by selecting it and paste it with the middle mouse button.
- pvtmert 4y agoit is the "primary" buffer, not clipboard. macos also have it. that is part of application handling. iterm, alacritty, and bunch of other apps can behave the same. Including Xquartz.
- bscphil 4y agoThis is a common complaint, but this issue is that Mac users and Linux users basically talk past each other on this point. Just speaking for myself, I find that I accidentally kill a process in the Mac terminal whenever I try to copy anything because I can't keep Ctrl-C and Cmd-C separate (both Windows and Linux use Ctrl exclusively, which means you don't have to tell them apart). If you're going to use Ctrl for shortcuts, you necessarily run into the issue needing a separate shortcut for copy in the terminal, because Ctrl-C has meant "send an interrupt signal to the process" since at least the 60s. Fortunately, for people sufficiently annoyed by this, most Linux terminals do allow you to change keyboard shortcuts arbitrarily, so you can have unified copy shortcuts if you want. For a variety of reasons, I find this more trouble than it is worth and prefer sticking with the default.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoI don't really care about my laptop being sophisticated as long as it doesn't crash.
- kergonath 4y ago> MacOS is one of the least technically sophisticated operating systems in common use Having a driver for a given Ethernet controller is hardly a good proxy for sophistication…
- jen729w 4y ago> Their main advantage over other systems is that some of us just really don’t like Windows and really like our Macs. We’re not fanboys. It’s just a preference. Chocolate vs. vanilla, football vs. cricket, boys vs. girls.