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I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. People were talking about real Unix terminals, for example. Later Windows also aimed for the

I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. People were talking about real Unix terminals, for example. Later Windows also aimed for the same thing with their new console app and Linux support. Yet macOS has remained the same. The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged and there’s no good app package service (eg brew etc - these are third party and can mess up your system.) Even Xcode is, well… look how extensions were restricted. Modern macOS feels boring, but also not aimed at developers.

tomxor 2y ago
Back in early 2000s it was a top choice if you wanted some kind of unixy box with a polished GUI desktop that "just worked", especially if you wanted a laptop. BSD and Linux were fine, but as a desktop OS they were a very different experience from today, took way more tinkering even on a desktop PC as anyone who had to write their own X11 config will tell you. Today installing a Linux desktop distro is so easy and hardware compatibility is so good that the tables have turned, also if you are the type of user that wants a big DE (no judgement) the Linux DEs today are far more polished, people still complain today but if you go back in time it was a mess. These days MacOS seems extremely restrictive and awkward by comparison, on the one hand a huge chunk of the userland got stuck in time, while Apple have become more and more hostile to any kind of changes and customisations to the more unixy side of the system.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Sun had an agreement with Toshiba for Solaris laptops, but they were rather pricey. UNIX is stuck in time, hardly anything improved beyond file systems, and small API improvements, and that is what macOS is measured against, POSIX certification. To note that the only standard UNIX UI is CDE, and anything 3D isn't part of POSIX.
  - anthk 2y ago
    ZFS, BcacheFS, HammerFS... I think OpenBSD will have a better FS soon. On modern FS', the plan9/9front ones are pretty much ahead of almost anything; but plan9 it's a Unix 2.0. It went further. On 3D, forget POSIX. GL was the de facto API and now Vulkan, and the most common middleware multimedia API it's SDL2.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Yeah, but none of that is UNIX(tm). While IrisGL was born on Irix, it was placed under ARB stewardship, which after Long Peaks disaster became Khronos. Vulkan only exists thanks to AMD offering Mantle to Khronos, an API designed originally for game consoles, very much not UNIX, and had it not been for AMD, Khronos would still be thinking what OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like. SDL also has very little with UNIX history, as it was created originally to port games from Windows to Mac OS (not OS X) and BeOS.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Linux isn’t too bad on desktops these days (at least if you’ve got well-suited hardware), but laptops are still hit or miss. Even laptops with well-supported hardware running something like powertop often have middling battery life, which isn’t helped by how on many distros things like h.264 hardware acceleration is not enabled in browsers out of the box. System76 is great and all but we really, really need a vertically integrated “Apple” of Linux laptops that goes the extra mile to dial in everything to perfection.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I don’t think much has changed, MacOS is still a good desktop Unix for development that is simple and just works, and Linux still lacks good hardware support, especially on laptops. Although in truth most of my MacOS development is actually in Linux containers.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I use macos and Pop_Os as my two main systems and both work really well. I got over the bleeding edge linuxism years ago as my 20s passed into obscurity. Both are respectable systems, and my need to tweak and adjust my setup has gone by the wayside. These days I just want something that works and both work fine for the jobs I need of them and can run a couple of weeks or more with no crashes or need to reboot until the next security updates come out. Linux does have limited hardware support, but it's easy to remedy if you do a little research, macOS is naturally limited in hardware selection; both are easily worked around.
carlosjobim 2y ago
> there’s no good app package service It's called the App Store.
- Philadelphia 2y ago
  I don’t think you can call the Mac App Store “good”.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Sure, it's horrible. It only makes it easier than any other platform for developers to make money by selling their software to users. And it only makes it easy and secure for users to purchase and install software. Awful.
- TimTheTinker 2y ago
  When's the last time you used the App Store to install a CLI utility or a shared library?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Usually Xcode.
    - TimTheTinker 2y ago
      xcode-select --install
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        That doesn’t install Xcode.
- lucasoshiro 2y ago
  Not exactly... The App Store install what you would install through .dmg or .pkg. This is, if you install, for example, Android Studio, Docker and UTM, you will have three QEMU executables, one for each app. Homebrew does quite a good job as a package manager for Mac, however, it's far from how the package managers work in Linux distros. For example, by running ``sudo pacman -Syu`` I upgrade everything that is installed, including the kernel, standard libraries, Python packages, language packages, manpages and so on. In Mac, I have to upgrade the system through system updates, homebrew packages through ``brew upgrade``, Python packages through pip, the App Store installed stuff through App Store and the manually installed apps through whatever the way they are upgraded.
throw0101b 2y ago
> I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. * https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged Is this supposed to be a bad thing?! It's a rock-solid workhorse. If they changed it I would stop trusting macOS to be any better than the linux flavor of the month
- vintagedave 2y ago
  Good point, but: * I'd prefer better font rendering * I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait. * Semi-transparent background was cool in the 2000s; these days everything is blurred like it's Vista (not a criticism, Windows does it too, it's just UI fashion.) A terminal background is a place where that might be genuinely useful. * This may be the shell, but when I reboot and restart I get my Terminal tabs reopened to the same working directories, but the history is identical between all of them. I run different commands in different folders for different reasons, and I want to be able to press up-arrow to get back the last command(s) per tab. I am far from a Terminal, shell, or anything related expert. There may be solutions to the above. But third party terminal apps exist so there must be a market for some problems & solutions.
  - Analemma_ 2y ago
    The Terminal seems like one of those things that management declares to be “done” and then nobody touches it for a decade, until somebody notices that there’s enough user outcry for a big overhaul. That’s what happened on Windows, where the console rotted for decades until there was finally enough attention to justify the (actually very nice!) new Windows Terminal. Hopefully there will be, because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      I’ve tried iTerm several times and have never been able to understand the appeal. The most interesting feature to me is the Visor-style dropdown terminal but that feature doesn’t work half as well as the Visor haxie for Terminal.app did, somehow.
WWLink 2y ago
Apple decided they only care about porn editors. Basically. lol.
EasyMark 2y ago
I've never had brew mess up my system and I've been using it and MacOS for over a decade... How can it mess up your system? I think one time brew itself got wedged on updates and I didn't care to bother to figure out what it was, followed the instructions on how to properly blow it away, and reinstalled with barely a hitch.
- TheNightman 2y ago
  Brew winds up hogging an inappropriate amount of disk space on every system I’ve ever installed it on. I switched to nix recently and haven’t had that problem yet. That being said I haven’t investigated and it could be user error. But brew can absolutely bork your shit
  - wpm 2y ago
    Having it cache a bunch of crap to your disc isn't exactly "borking your shit". Just delete it. There's probably some settings flag you can export in your shell .rc to control that behavior, but its so not a problem it hasn't been worth my time to go look up how to do it.

tomxor 2y ago

Back in early 2000s it was a top choice if you wanted some kind of unixy box with a polished GUI desktop that "just worked", especially if you wanted a laptop. BSD and Linux were fine, but as a desktop OS they were a very different experience from today, took way more tinkering even on a desktop PC as anyone who had to write their own X11 config will tell you. Today installing a Linux desktop distro is so easy and hardware compatibility is so good that the tables have turned, also if you are the type of user that wants a big DE (no judgement) the Linux DEs today are far more polished, people still complain today but if you go back in time it was a mess. These days MacOS seems extremely restrictive and awkward by comparison, on the one hand a huge chunk of the userland got stuck in time, while Apple have become more and more hostile to any kind of changes and customisations to the more unixy side of the system.

pjmlp 2y ago
Sun had an agreement with Toshiba for Solaris laptops, but they were rather pricey. UNIX is stuck in time, hardly anything improved beyond file systems, and small API improvements, and that is what macOS is measured against, POSIX certification. To note that the only standard UNIX UI is CDE, and anything 3D isn't part of POSIX.
- anthk 2y ago
  ZFS, BcacheFS, HammerFS... I think OpenBSD will have a better FS soon. On modern FS', the plan9/9front ones are pretty much ahead of almost anything; but plan9 it's a Unix 2.0. It went further. On 3D, forget POSIX. GL was the de facto API and now Vulkan, and the most common middleware multimedia API it's SDL2.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Yeah, but none of that is UNIX(tm). While IrisGL was born on Irix, it was placed under ARB stewardship, which after Long Peaks disaster became Khronos. Vulkan only exists thanks to AMD offering Mantle to Khronos, an API designed originally for game consoles, very much not UNIX, and had it not been for AMD, Khronos would still be thinking what OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like. SDL also has very little with UNIX history, as it was created originally to port games from Windows to Mac OS (not OS X) and BeOS.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Linux isn’t too bad on desktops these days (at least if you’ve got well-suited hardware), but laptops are still hit or miss. Even laptops with well-supported hardware running something like powertop often have middling battery life, which isn’t helped by how on many distros things like h.264 hardware acceleration is not enabled in browsers out of the box. System76 is great and all but we really, really need a vertically integrated “Apple” of Linux laptops that goes the extra mile to dial in everything to perfection.
_yb2s 2y ago
I don’t think much has changed, MacOS is still a good desktop Unix for development that is simple and just works, and Linux still lacks good hardware support, especially on laptops. Although in truth most of my MacOS development is actually in Linux containers.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I use macos and Pop_Os as my two main systems and both work really well. I got over the bleeding edge linuxism years ago as my 20s passed into obscurity. Both are respectable systems, and my need to tweak and adjust my setup has gone by the wayside. These days I just want something that works and both work fine for the jobs I need of them and can run a couple of weeks or more with no crashes or need to reboot until the next security updates come out. Linux does have limited hardware support, but it's easy to remedy if you do a little research, macOS is naturally limited in hardware selection; both are easily worked around.

carlosjobim 2y ago

> there’s no good app package service It's called the App Store.

Philadelphia 2y ago
I don’t think you can call the Mac App Store “good”.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Sure, it's horrible. It only makes it easier than any other platform for developers to make money by selling their software to users. And it only makes it easy and secure for users to purchase and install software. Awful.
TimTheTinker 2y ago
When's the last time you used the App Store to install a CLI utility or a shared library?
- bombcar 2y ago
  Usually Xcode.
  - TimTheTinker 2y ago
    xcode-select --install
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      That doesn’t install Xcode.
lucasoshiro 2y ago
Not exactly... The App Store install what you would install through .dmg or .pkg. This is, if you install, for example, Android Studio, Docker and UTM, you will have three QEMU executables, one for each app. Homebrew does quite a good job as a package manager for Mac, however, it's far from how the package managers work in Linux distros. For example, by running ``sudo pacman -Syu`` I upgrade everything that is installed, including the kernel, standard libraries, Python packages, language packages, manpages and so on. In Mac, I have to upgrade the system through system updates, homebrew packages through ``brew upgrade``, Python packages through pip, the App Store installed stuff through App Store and the manually installed apps through whatever the way they are upgraded.

throw0101b 2y ago

> I remember the Unix-ness was a big part of OS X’s nerd popularity. * https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged Is this supposed to be a bad thing?! It's a rock-solid workhorse. If they changed it I would stop trusting macOS to be any better than the linux flavor of the month

vintagedave 2y ago
Good point, but: * I'd prefer better font rendering * I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait. * Semi-transparent background was cool in the 2000s; these days everything is blurred like it's Vista (not a criticism, Windows does it too, it's just UI fashion.) A terminal background is a place where that might be genuinely useful. * This may be the shell, but when I reboot and restart I get my Terminal tabs reopened to the same working directories, but the history is identical between all of them. I run different commands in different folders for different reasons, and I want to be able to press up-arrow to get back the last command(s) per tab. I am far from a Terminal, shell, or anything related expert. There may be solutions to the above. But third party terminal apps exist so there must be a market for some problems & solutions.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  The Terminal seems like one of those things that management declares to be “done” and then nobody touches it for a decade, until somebody notices that there’s enough user outcry for a big overhaul. That’s what happened on Windows, where the console rotted for decades until there was finally enough attention to justify the (actually very nice!) new Windows Terminal. Hopefully there will be, because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    I’ve tried iTerm several times and have never been able to understand the appeal. The most interesting feature to me is the Visor-style dropdown terminal but that feature doesn’t work half as well as the Visor haxie for Terminal.app did, somehow.

WWLink 2y ago

Apple decided they only care about porn editors. Basically. lol.

EasyMark 2y ago

I've never had brew mess up my system and I've been using it and MacOS for over a decade... How can it mess up your system? I think one time brew itself got wedged on updates and I didn't care to bother to figure out what it was, followed the instructions on how to properly blow it away, and reinstalled with barely a hitch.

TheNightman 2y ago
Brew winds up hogging an inappropriate amount of disk space on every system I’ve ever installed it on. I switched to nix recently and haven’t had that problem yet. That being said I haven’t investigated and it could be user error. But brew can absolutely bork your shit
- wpm 2y ago
  Having it cache a bunch of crap to your disc isn't exactly "borking your shit". Just delete it. There's probably some settings flag you can export in your shell .rc to control that behavior, but its so not a problem it hasn't been worth my time to go look up how to do it.