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Although I honor this huge effort - just looking like macOS does not mean it is macOS-Like. I hate to say this, but macOS is way more than just its look. Most p
by sandreas 4y ago
Although I honor this huge effort - just looking like macOS does not mean it is macOS-Like. I hate to say this, but macOS is way more than just its look. Most people miss that. I doubt that these FreeBSD changes will contain the following macOS-Like features:
- The best touchpad expierience including kinetic / inertial scrolling, rubberbanding,etc.
- Apps like Mail and Preview with its simple but yet powerful set of features
- Fast and stable Wifi
- Battery life
- Excellent Typography
- System wide function keys (play, pause, volume up, etc.) that work everywhere
- Quick look
- Air drop
I recently switched from macOS to Fedora 36 and will keep using it, because it is awesome, but the things I miss the most are listed above :-) But prefer freedom over macOS-Like, so kudos for posting this.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThe best thing to not have from macOS is the idiotic display system that prevents you from using a non-Apple HiDPI monitor.
- BearOso 4y agoThat's because what seemed like the best way to do hidpi when macOS added it (fixed scale factors and assets) ended up being a problem. It's better to not abstract away the DPI differences. It makes for worse compatibility in the short term, but much better long-term. The behavior with high refresh rates is pretty bad, too. A lot of stuff is hardcoded to 60hz, and programs have to opt in. They haven't even fixed Safari properly yet.
- lproven 4y agoStrongly disagree. Every time I read about the benefits of Wayland, I read shopping list of stuff I don't care about and don't want. I don't give a stuff about techie nerdwank like refresh rates, tearing, video smoothness, triple buffering and other pointless implementation details that it is the entire job of a GUI to make go away. What I care about is that I plug in a screen, I drag a window onto it, and it stays the same size. That my window can straddle two screens and still work. That I can resize it across as many screens as I want. I want it to work and I want how that happens to be invisible. Wayland, as far as I can tell, is about xNix graphics programmers complaining about how hard the job is, I'm afraid.
- BearOso 4y agoFrom what you describe we actually strongly agree. This stuff should work and be invisible to the user. I just meant that the environment should expose the DPI details to the programmer and not pretend everything is low dpi like it's always been. Wayland is about a bunch of amateur programmers learning for the first time how graphics work, individually and separately all in parallel. Wayland needed to have a bigger, definitive core library designed by experienced developers. What we've got now instead is a myriad of low-level graphics implementations, none of which handle edge cases very well.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoGeary had promise as a sort of FOSS Mail.app counterpart but last I knew development on it had stalled. In theory Thunderbird could fill that need but it’s always felt kinda cludgy and odd in comparison.
- sandreas 4y agoThe best FOSS mail apps I came across, are 1.) Evolution (Gnome / Linux) Although it may not be the shiniest star, it has a huge feature set and works pretty good for me. 2.) Mailspring It is a pretty good Mail.app Alternative, but I did not like the restrictions and the user interface was pretty unpolished, although pretty Mail.app-like The most annoying part on all Mail apps I tested was the search. It was mostly unusable, if you have ever used macOS Mail. The search is so much ahead of every other mail app I tested (and I tested a ton) that I don't know if it is just hard to build it or no one ever tried to rebuild the Mail.app search. The only app that was pretty close was mutt/neomutt, but although I like terminal interfaces, in Mail I often use Mime features like bullet lists, tables, Image previews and other stuff that is hard to do in Terminal UIs.
- squarefoot 4y agoI'm fully satisfied by Claws Mail, however thread oriented message grouping like Geary would be a nice improvement, along with a sleeker UI. I would not however give up too much performance for it; Claws Mail speed to me is one of its major selling points.
- 4y ago
- nomad41 4y agoA Quick look alternative is preinstalled on Fedora (GNOME sushi). Just press space while on the file manager.
- sandreas 4y agoThx, I know sushi, it was the first thing that I've found that made me love fedora. Out of the box quick look :-) But it is only similar to quick look, not as polished and integrated. Good enough though. Pretty much like the touchpad experience, if you tune a few settings, buy a glass touchpad from a Yoga x1y3 for your T480s WQHD[1] and install `libinput-config` to fix the kinetic scrolling on HiDPI :-) But don't use touchpad drivers like mtrack or synaptics. Stick to libinput... I plan to publish all my findings and research in a `Transition from macOS to Fedora` article in my blog, but 2 toddlers take their time ;) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/fo6hrc/i_replaced_my_t480s_trackpad_with_the_x1y3_glass/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/fo6hrc/i_replaced...
- reaperducer 4y agoA Quick look alternative is preinstalled on Fedora (GNOME sushi). Just press space while on the file manager. It's not equivalent. With QuickLook, I can not only preview files, I can manipulate them. For example, I can crop an image, or add a signature to a PDF, or even edit an image that I'm previewing on my computer with my phone or tablet and the result is on my computer instantly.
- microtonal 4y agoAnd well-developed third-party apps that integrate deeply into the rich macOS APIs. E.g., the other day someone posted Shortcat which provides keyboard shortcuts for every GUI application, by using macOS accessibility API (which apparently works everywhere, including in Electron apps): https://shortcat.app https://shortcat.app Another good (recent) example is Mimestream, a client for Google Mail, which is one of the best mail apps that I have ever used: https://mimestream.com https://mimestream.com Apps like that are not only a testament to the awesome indie developers in the ecosystem, but also the great APIs that make it possible to develop such application as a solo developer.
- alwillis 4y agoApps like theses are known as Mac-assed Mac apps: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
- sandreas 4y agoYes, and pretty likely, these apps get "Sherlocked"[1], if they are really really good :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
- kps 4y ago- Keyboard shortcuts that don't steal ASCII control characters
- FullyFunctional 4y agoamend that with "a good subset of Emacs editing functionality that works almost everywhere (^p, ^b, ^f, ^n, ^k, ^y, ^e, ^a, ^t, ....)" The use of Control is the single-most annoying behavior of all these surface-only reskins.
- anthk 4y agogtk-key-theme-name=emacs at ~/.gtk-2.0 and simillary ~/.config/gtk3.0/settings.ini after the [settings] block.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoHonest question: what does that do to application shortcuts? Say, printing. On macOS, cmd-p will open the print dialog. In Gnome (and in Windows I assume) ctrl-p does the same. With the theme above, what happen on ctrl-p and where's the keyboard short for, say, print?
- anthk 4y agoIDK, I think the shortcuts open on dialogs and widgets.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago?? I don't know what that means, but AFAICT, the keybindings you suggested does not actually solve the problem with the use of Control. I tried to make that as painfully obviously as possible with the Print shortcut; control-p can't both be previous-line and a shortcut for print.
- gtk40 4y agoOne thing I wish were easy to configure on FreeBSD and Linux that makes macOS feel more "Unixy"[1] is using Cmd+ for most application shortcuts and reserving Ctrl+ for Bash-style shortcuts throughout most textfields. [1] Yes I realize macOS is a flavor of UNIX
- rollcat 4y ago<https://kinto.sh/ https://kinto.sh/>, also for a less drastic makeover - check out gtk-key-theme-name=emacs.
- sandreas 4y agoYou sir, deserve a cookie!
- rollcat 4y agomunch
- least 4y agoKintosh is great and is a very thorough implementation that is not simple remapping from linux/windows to mac analogs, but also considerate of conflicts in various applications as well. I believe in terminal emulators in Linux, for example, cmd+v will send ctrl+shift+v instead of simply ctrl+v. There's some drawbacks, though. Wayland support doesn't exist. It's still a "hack" rather than a system wide adoption of MacOS keybind paradigms. It can't possibly account for all edge cases. I would say if you're looking for advanced remapping of keys in linux you might want to look at Interception Tools[1] since it works on both X and Wayland, though programmable keyboards with QMK or ZMK are still going to generally be a better option. [1] https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools
- totetsu 4y agoThe amount of times I accidentally opened developer tools in the browser or started a call to a group chat in teams because my mind was stuck in ctrl+shift+ mode from using the terminal..
- pjmlp 4y agoThey also miss the development experience of OS frameworks in modern languages, only comparable to Google and Microsoft platforms.
- rollcat 4y agoLet me add a few: - Handover (shared clipboard between devices, continuing tasks on another device) - AirPlay (both casting and playback control) - Apps are just self-contained, launchable directories you can copy around, no separate installation step - Application-centric (as opposed to window-centric) task management - Tiny things like <Cmd-tab>, keep holding Cmd, click the app to switch to - Even tinier things, like hold space to move the selection rectangle in the screenshot tool - Extremely consistent support for all basic keyboard shortcuts like <Cmd-q>, <Cmd-w>, <Cmd-,>, etc, going back all the way to the classic Mac OS - AppleScript, Shortcuts, (Automator) - Color management It's these things I miss on Linux and (Open)BSD the most, not the GUI theme. I actually think the current design (starting with Big Sur) is a huge step backward for accessibility and usability, fortunately this project doesn't blindly copy it.
- seiferteric 4y agoAlso iMessage, video & voice calls, find my friends are great to have.
- dTal 4y agoThe functionality you describe in "Handover" is achieved (and more besides, such as playback control) on Linux with KDE Connect.
- least 4y agoHandoff is only a small part of the continuity stuff Apple has for working between your Apple devices and it's called Continuity [1]. KDE Connect is great but it comes nowhere close to mimicking the functionality of it. [1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/ https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/
- msla 4y agoSounds like a privacy nightmare, not to mention a huge security hole.
- 4y ago
- wildrhythms 4y ago+ OS-wide drag and drop that works in basically every application for many things, especially images. The number of times on Linux I try to drag an image out of Firefox and into an open file browser only to be met with the "not allowed" cursor is truly infuriating.
- brokenkebab2 4y ago>System wide function keys (play, pause, volume up, etc.) that work everywhere What's so special about it? The only difference between my Asus with Linux, and Mac in this regard is that on Mac I have to use touch stripe which is inferior experience compared to physical keys. I also see no discernible difference in many other things you mention like wifi stability.
- machinawhite 4y agoMy WiFi is fine too (as long as you have the right chip!) but the touchpad thing alone almost made me replace my thinkpad with an m1 air. Now I'm on an unholy win/linux/ios setup and don't really get use all the Apple integrations, but I have to admit I wish I could, not for gnarly dev stuff, but simply to make my life easier
- brokenkebab2 4y agoI can easily agree that Mac's touchpad is nice, as many other pieces of its hardware. MacOS however is not as good as it used to be (comparatively), because other OSes advanced significantly while retaining better configurability. Btw, any touchpad should be used for a limited time, say in travel conditions. If you use it so much it became a decisive factor of choice - you are voluntarily marching towards RSI.
- machinawhite 4y agoI appreciate the concern, I mosty use an ergonomic mouse and rarely use the touchpad (the one in my ThinkPad is utter trash anyway but that's a different story). It's just for me personally, build quality and UX will always be decisive factors and I will pay extra for that with no hesitation. macOS' weirdness is actually what's preventing me from buying into this ecosystem although I love how it looks. Pretty sure it's not a very 1337h4x0r thing to say but I like nice colors and consistent designs more than tweaking configs and writing cursed scripts. YMMV
- whalesalad 4y agodon't forget a unified clipboard!
- worthless-trash 4y ago> - Fast and stable Wifi I have found fedora's wifi to be significantly better than osx's wifi. Your other options, I can't say because they are things that I don't use, or never found a use for in other operating systems.
- alwillis 4y agoListen, there’s no need to point all the ways this isn’t totally Mac-like. macOS as we know it (not even getting into its NeXTStep roots) has been continuously developed since its Public Beta [1] shipped in 2001. Many tens of millions of dollars of resources have been invested in macOS development over 20+ years. So of course I’m not expecting a shell script to turn FreeBSD into anything close to the UI/UX of macOS except in a very superficial way. I appreciate the effort; it’s already better looking than most default desktop environments for FreeBSD. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta