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It's unfortunate that some of what made MacOS great for developers is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS. Apple has made devel
by streblo 4y ago
It's unfortunate that some of what made MacOS great for developers is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS. Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos. I hope Apple takes this customer segment seriously and reverses course here, but I'm not super hopeful.
The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoWindows also has some unfortunate papercuts like font rendering that's still optimized for super low rez displays all these years later, with bad hinting and kerning. Seriously, this drives me nuts. It's better when DPI scaling is above 1.0 but it's still not as good as that of macOS or any Linux desktop environment. Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.
- rcarmo 4y agoI have been using HIDPI displays on Windows for years and have zero issues with the font rendering. It is _different_ from macOS and Linux, sure, but I can’t see any reason to diss it today.
- ryandrake 4y agoI've always found Windows's font rendering to be subjectively "off" in a way I couldn't really articulate. I'm not enough of a typography expert to explain what I'm seeing. Text display just seems beautiful on Mac and a half-assed afterthought on Windows. My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?
- antics9 4y agoTry Fedora. My iMac from 2011 is still running strong on that. Same on my XPS 13. Haven't needed to do any special configuration yet.
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- justsomehnguy 4y ago> is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS I have a sudden flashback of 2012
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- CharlesW 4y agoI'm confused. How is Stage Manager a "developer-hostile move"?
- streblo 4y agoI'm talking more about things like you can't use apps that haven't been blessed by Apple without jumping through hoops, you can't easily install some third party OSS without installing XCode clutils, for a while you seemed not to be able to use sudo without booting into recovery mode and flipping some switch. Those kinds of things are 'developer-hostile' in my mind because they just make your life harder as a developer, and to what end? I haven't upgraded and used Stage Manager yet so I don't have any opinion on it.
- Gigachad 4y agoYou can use sudo, you just can’t modify OS files without disabling SIP which you can do from recovery mode. This seems fine to me. The problem is regular users follow some instructions that say paste in to the terminal and then the OS asks for a password like it always does, and now you have malware embedded in your OS. With the new model, you’d have to guide the user through getting in to recovery mode which is either too confusing or sets off alarm bells for the user. As a developer I can’t really see why you’d want to touch these OS files unless you are hacking on the OS itself and at that point you should be smart enough to know how to turn it off
- forrestthewoods 4y agoWhy is POSIX a strict requirement? > Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment. Exactly why I prefer Windows development to macOS and Linux!
- vanviegen 4y agoThat seems backwards. Linux distro's come with mostly reasonable defaults and a decent set of apps. Windows PCs come with loads of crapware and no useful apps to speak of.
- forrestthewoods 4y agoWindows 11 is full of Microsoft crap I’ll give you that. But configuring a brand new MacBook or new Linux install for development is pure hell. It’s a bloody nightmare. Linux is, for better and worse, an endless stream of configuration. The upside is you CAN configure it. The downside is you have to, constantly. > Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment. I was responding to this statement. Do you want constantly and carefully configure your machine? Use Linux and be happy! Do you want something that works out of the box? Windows is pretty darn good. I do game development which is Windows through and through. YMMV.
- vanviegen 4y agoI teach a software development undergraduate programme. We have our students use Linux for all development. We have them do no configuration whatsoever, unless you count installing a couple of packages from the package manager and a few vscode extensions. Works just fine out of the box.
- megaman821 4y agoMacOS is a great platform but I find all their apps terrible. Luckily there is a very active development community and I don't have to use any of them. * Finder -> Path Finder * Spotlight -> Alfred * Stage Manager/Snapping -> Moom * Safari -> Chrome/Firefox * Mail/Calendar/Contacts -> Outlook * Photos -> Google Photos * Maps -> Google Maps * Weather -> Weather Channel * System Sound -> SoundSource * System Screen Shots -> Clean Shot X * System Menu Bar -> Bartender * Terminal -> iTerm2 * Preview (I actually use this one)
- kitsunesoba 4y agoI've never been able to get a good grip on what people find bad about Finder. Once View > Show Path Bar and View > Show Status Bar have been selected and current folder searching has been enabled in Preferences I don't find it any worse than Windows Explorer, GNOME Files, or any of the numerous derivations of GNOME Files (Nemo, Thunar, etc).
- megaman821 4y agoIn my case I just wanted a button on the Finder toolbar that opens up the current folder in the default terminal.
- jmbwell 4y agoI have [right-click/control-click] > Services > New Terminal at Folder Is that standard now, or did I add it long ago and forget?
- megaman821 4y agoThat is standard now. It wasn't when a started using Path Finder. I still find it slower than just having the button in the toolbar.
- guestbest 4y agoI keep terminal.app in the tool bar and just drag and drop the folder on to the dock where the terminal app is
- MisterTea 4y ago> Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. Cygwin. > I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others? Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoI think if I were to try to make any DE work the way I'd like it to it would have to be my full-time job for a while for there to be any hope of it being finished any time this decade. The list of changes is huge irrespective of the DE used as a starting point, and the changes large enough that upstream probably wouldn't want them which brings the overhead of maintaining a fork. Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.
- mmmpetrichor 4y agois cygwin still usable right now? With e.g. docker? I would have assumed WSL is way better at this point at giving a true native env.
- fragmede 4y agoTime is very precious. As someone who's done the investment into both desktop Linux (Openbox) and MacOS, the level of effort required to get something useful is way different. MacOS has a very gentle learning curve so it's easy to switch and be back in business, getting work done. Linux OTOH is less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff. I've got the exact right monitor setup I want on Linux, but it required learning xrandr and writing a shell script because none of the GUI frontends could get it right. With MacOS I kinda just have to accept whatever it gives me as good enough. Thankfully it usually is though. Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.
- Mikeb85 4y ago> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment. Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoSame here. I (for reasons) set up new Linux distros with abandon and just go with Ubuntu and its defaults (swapping control and CapsLock is mostly all I change). The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...
- zephyr9 4y agoThere's always icloud.com
- FullyFunctional 4y agoNope doesn’t at all provide the same functionality. I would love it if it did though.
- Vinnl 4y agoYeah, feels like the obvious option missing. I don't use Ubuntu any more, but it's the popular Linux, so it serves plenty of people just fine. Makes it the sane generic recommendation without letting my personal preference slip in. Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.
- nomel 4y ago> Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos. Could you give some examples?
- Gigachad 4y agoI think what happens is for basically anyone trying an OS that isn’t their daily driver, they hit a few things which don’t work the same or that they don’t quite understand and immediately come to the conclusion that it’s bad/broken/hostile/unproductive. I’m a long time linux user and just switched to macOS for work at the start if the year and in that first month I could rattle out a long list of complaints but now I don’t really care about any of that. Most of it was just me applying my expectations of Linux on to another OS. When there are other ways to skin the cat and none of them are really better than the others. There are also some things that are actually just bad like full screen mode but that you learn to deal with to the point you forgot it was even bad. I can think of these kinds of things for every OS.
- mmmpetrichor 4y agoWSL not deeply integrated? When was the last time you used it? I can't imagine a use case where you need your core OS to be posix based, and WSL with whatever linux VM isn't good enough as a dev environment. VScode in windows with WSL is the perfect dev combo.
- howinteresting 4y agoI don't need to have my OS be posix-based, but I do need it to have a decent auto-tiling setup and a checksummed filesystem with fast snapshots and rollbacks.
- mmmpetrichor 4y agoby checksummed filesystem, do you mean a filesystem that maintains integrity? don't all modern file systems do that? I have little to no idea about how mac and windows compare with snapshots. I have never needed that in my OS. Do you use that for test environment replication or something?
- howinteresting 4y agoI mean btrfs or zfs. Just like auto-tiling, once you have it you'll have no idea how you lived without it.
- mmmpetrichor 4y agosuppose I recreated my desktop with zfs rather than ext4. What wonders could I expect? :)
- howinteresting 4y agoThe main ones I use are: * make automatic snapshots that you can recover data from as necessary, and have them be created every time the system updates (I've needed to use this once) * have those automatic snapshots be auto synced to my NAS, creating a backup (also used this once when my hardware failed)
- stitched2gethr 4y agoEnter the terminal. Don't leave. It's basically the same everywhere.
- bigiain 4y agoOnce you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop. Sometimes I seriously suspect the only things keeping me from doing that are SublimeText and Pixelmator. I have not yet gotten annoyed enough with macOS to relearn all my finger macros that've been driving Sublime for a decade and getting up to speed with a different text editor, or to have leaned how to drive Gimp well enough to be reasonably able toi use it to replace Pixelmator in a productive fashion. Oh, and _maybe_ OmniGraffle, but I'm not sure I've even opened that yet this year.
- macNchz 4y agoSublime has a Linux build which works perfectly! I switched from MacOS to Ubuntu as a daily driver two years ago. Keyboard shortcuts generally were the biggest annoyance, however I can’t speak to Sublime shortcuts specifically, as I have all my editors set to use Emacs style bindings.
- Klonoar 4y ago>Once you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop. I mean, frankly... no. I live in the terminal on my Mac, but I still need a browser to deal with everything else. The battery life on a MacBook alone will kick the everloving hell out of most non-Apple laptops currently. Scrolling is always smooth, and I don't even hear a fan these days with the M1. Living in the terminal on macOS affords you relative consistency; while yes, Apple has changed things in releases (or held back due to licensing stuff), it all mostly works as expected and will generally not break between OS releases. That's the important bit here.
- midoridensha 4y agoApple really should just phase out MacOS and replace it with iOS and a touchscreen interface (including for desktop systems). They can call it being "brave", and if you don't like it, they can tell you that you're just using it wrong.
- bombolo 4y agoInstalling a compiler on linux is certainly easier than doing so on osx.
- pkulak 4y agoWait, what are you configuring? Just install Fedora or Ubuntu, install your favorite IDE, and go.
- pjmlp 4y agoDeveloper != UNIX. Apple is still great for Apple ecosystem developers.