9 ms·

I switched from FreeBSD as my desktop to OSX about four years ago because: a) I needed a unix based desktop b) I needed end user components (browser, printing

by rsync 14y ago

I switched from FreeBSD as my desktop to OSX about four years ago because: a) I needed a unix based desktop b) I needed end user components (browser, printing, etc.) that just worked Circa 2008, everything in Safari "just worked" - every site, every player, every piece of embedded bullshit on every little web 2.0 site blah blah blah. But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ? I think OSX still has an edge for me, in terms of getting things done, due to printing and ... ? It's getting awfully close to even, though.

fusiongyro 14y ago
I'm with you. Switched from Linux in about 2003, but lately I've been trying to get back into Linux (Ubuntu, as if that matters). I feel like the walls are closing in and I don't like it.
- astrodust 14y ago
  You're not obligated to use Safari, you know.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    And I don't. But that isn't the main thing.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  I've been using Linux Mint, and can highly recommend it.
PCheese 14y ago
Really? If you want these plugins, just do the one-time install when you first encounter the Missing Plug-In message, and then everything will "just work" again. (Well, perhaps you'll have worse battery life and maybe a less secure system.) There's a reason why that error message has a button next to it that makes it really easy to install the missing piece, as opposed to hunting for the right software on the Internet. Can you be more specific about needing to "manually futz around with flash every two weeks"? I'm guessing you mean software updates, but I have a hard time believing that Flash stops working unless you update it. If you don't value the added security of having Flash updates decoupled from OS X releases, then you can just tell Flash to stop prompting you to update (or better, just tell it to do so automatically).
masklinn 14y ago
> But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ? I don't understand how the java plugin is an issue. It's been disabled on all my machines for the last 4 years, and I don't remember any instance where I'd have whished to enable that thing.
- spullara 14y ago
  There are a variety of things that still use it. VPN services are probably the #1. WebEx and other services like that a close second.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    I found out yesterday that songkick's itunes importer is an applet. I think for some things applets may still be the best solution, though of course it's a shrinking market.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Some banks rely on Java. Also, I guess a lot of browser-based management of enterprise computing "stuff" runs as a Java applets as well. I've used server and SAN managers that require Java.
- joshuakarjala 14y ago
  In Denmark there is a Government created SSO (NemID) which is required in any interactions with government agencies. Need to move and update your registered address? Java Need to file your taxes? Java Need to check your last paycheck, insurance statement? Java Want to gamble through the national gambling provider? Java As stated by others: Need to check your bank account? Java
  - xinsight 14y ago
    Same in Germany if you want to file your taxes online. However, using a java applet to login is slow and painful. Maybe this move my Apple will increase support costs and encourage these govt agencies to drop the java requirement.
notatoad 14y ago
I'm curious what you're using that requires flash. as far as i can tell, it's pretty much dead. youtube and vimeo both support HTML5, and other than that it's just ads and games.
- riffraff 14y ago
  github's "copy url" bit! Also, there is more video on the internet than youtube and vimeo, there is decent software done in flash (such as balsamiq mockups) and sometimes it's the only way to get to some content. I have flash disabled with click2play and I end up starting it _at least_ once a day.
  - wfarr 14y ago
    > github's "copy url" bit! That's entirely a limitation imposed by JavaScript not supporting keyboard access. We'd rather not rely on Flash, but we have to in this case.
    - riffraff 14y ago
      I guess you mean "clipboard"? Anyway, I was being facetious, but that does show there are things you can do currently with flash|java|whatever that you can't do with JS. Obviously I'll be happier when it's possible to do everything only with JS.
- icebraining 14y ago
  The biggest users nowadays are probably porn websites, but you still find it every where on little things. Our national weather observatory, for example, uses a Flash based map to show animated forecasts.
- imrehg 14y ago
  Loads of websites here in Taiwan. While the rest of the world you could say "moved on", that's just not true, other places keep making the same crappy websites like it's 1997...
borlak 14y ago
Since I was the lone developer using windows at my workplace, I decided to give Apple/OSX a fair shake. The fact OSX was unix based seemed awesome to me (some of my projects are in C). Then began the hell of trying to do anything "unixy" on OSX. Custom libraries just for the mac (custom libev??), needing to install XCode Dev Tools to get gcc compiler(???). Sigh. In the end I just ended up running a CentOS VM in virtualbox, and I do my development there. The ONLY benefit I currently gain from a Mac is creating iOS apps.
- astrodust 14y ago
  If you were on Windows you'd need to install Visual Studio just to get a compiler. XCode is similar. You haven't seen hell until you try and use Cygwin on Windows to get anything "unixy" done. It sounds like you weren't using MacPorts or Homebrew to build your libraries. They're a lot closer to the distributions you see on Linux and BSD.
  - finnw 14y ago
    > If you were on Windows you'd need to install Visual Studio just to get a compiler. Not true, even if you consider only Microsoft software. http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279 http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279 And if my project involves heavy use of shared libraries, I'll take cygwin over macports any day.
    - evilduck 14y ago
      Apple's command line tools for XCode are available as a separate download from XCode from their developer portal too.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      I didn't know Microsoft had a stand-alone compiler, but I'm not even sure what such a thing would be used for other than to be embedded in some other software. How is cygwin any better than a package manager like MacPorts or Homebrew? If you're having this much trouble with shared libraries, you're doing something quite odd. They're usually less obnoxious than their equivalent .DLL files. Apple has gone to great lengths to get fully POSIX certified. As far as the libraries go, they're nearly identical to their Linux or BSD counterparts. The number of platform-specific issues you'll have to deal with when using standard versions of the libraries are usually small. In looking through open source, I always see a lot more of `#ifdef WINDOWS` than I do for anything OS X specific, especially in the networking and threading departments.
LnxPrgr3 14y ago
To be fair, the one thing they don't want to just work is exploits. Neither Flash nor Java has the best security track record. Java lately has been embarrassingly bad: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/critical-bug-discovered-in-newest-java/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/critical-bug-discove... Of course, they were already installing the Java plugin but disabling it by default; not sure why they needed to take the extra step of removing the plugin completely.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Neither Flash nor Java has the best security track record. Java lately has been embarrassingly bad People say this sort of thing a lot, and obviously with some justification. However, it's not as if the browsers themselves have a great track record on security either. Firefox had to yank their last update shortly after making it available because of a severe problem, and the update was itself intended to fix quite a few serious security vulnerabilities. Every month we get around to update day for Windows and there are typically a handful of security fixes for IE pushed out. And so on. It seems fairly clear by now that no-one actually makes a really secure browser yet, with or without plug-ins. It's just a problem that we haven't yet learned to solve, at least not without sacrificing some other benefit that the teams making mainstream browsers value more and choose to prioritise. If we need independent security tools to keep browsing safe anyway, is avoiding plug-ins any more than a modest improvement? (And I write this as someone who did once get hit by an undisclosed and unpatched exploit in Java, resulting in a complete reinstall. It wasn't fun. But I don't suppose it would have been any more fun if it had been a zero-day vulnerability in the browser itself.)
  - LnxPrgr3 14y ago
    You're right. IIRC, the last non-Java security update I installed updated a bunch of image format libraries to fix exploitable vulnerabilities. We can't even safely decode static image files! I'm not sure how we expect to safely sandbox executable code, whether it's Flash, Java, Javascript, or anything else. Even so, if Java's currently being exploited on a wide scale and Oracle's not having the greatest luck fixing the problems letting malware in, it seems prudent to direct people away from it unless they really, really need it. Any well may be poisoned, but if you know this one is you'd avoid it and warn others, wouldn't you?
acdha 14y ago
> But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ? Just disable Flash in Safari until Adobe has a Chrome-level automatic update mechanism. I use Chrome for precisely that reason - I haven't had to think about Flash since they started packaging it. I've had Flash disabled in Safari for a long time and almost everything works without it - the only thing I notice regularly missing are the copy/paste convenience helpers on sites like bit.ly. As for Java, I have exactly one site where I need to run it - the Web100 NDT testers - and that's both a niche case and hardly compelling versus the security considerations of using a product from a recklessly inattentive maintainer.
ams6110 14y ago
CUPS these days pretty much "just works" so there goes your other reason...
hnriot 14y ago
OSX still just works, Chrome and Firefox are easy browsers to keep working, there's not really any maintenance required. That said these are not really reasons to switch operating systems, there's nothing particularly difficult about using chrome or Firefox on Linux, or for that matter, printing.

by rsync 14y ago

fusiongyro 14y ago

I'm with you. Switched from Linux in about 2003, but lately I've been trying to get back into Linux (Ubuntu, as if that matters). I feel like the walls are closing in and I don't like it.

astrodust 14y ago
You're not obligated to use Safari, you know.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  And I don't. But that isn't the main thing.
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
I've been using Linux Mint, and can highly recommend it.

PCheese 14y ago

Really? If you want these plugins, just do the one-time install when you first encounter the Missing Plug-In message, and then everything will "just work" again. (Well, perhaps you'll have worse battery life and maybe a less secure system.) There's a reason why that error message has a button next to it that makes it really easy to install the missing piece, as opposed to hunting for the right software on the Internet. Can you be more specific about needing to "manually futz around with flash every two weeks"? I'm guessing you mean software updates, but I have a hard time believing that Flash stops working unless you update it. If you don't value the added security of having Flash updates decoupled from OS X releases, then you can just tell Flash to stop prompting you to update (or better, just tell it to do so automatically).

masklinn 14y ago

> But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ? I don't understand how the java plugin is an issue. It's been disabled on all my machines for the last 4 years, and I don't remember any instance where I'd have whished to enable that thing.

spullara 14y ago
There are a variety of things that still use it. VPN services are probably the #1. WebEx and other services like that a close second.
- riffraff 14y ago
  I found out yesterday that songkick's itunes importer is an applet. I think for some things applets may still be the best solution, though of course it's a shrinking market.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gizzlon 14y ago
Some banks rely on Java. Also, I guess a lot of browser-based management of enterprise computing "stuff" runs as a Java applets as well. I've used server and SAN managers that require Java.
joshuakarjala 14y ago
In Denmark there is a Government created SSO (NemID) which is required in any interactions with government agencies. Need to move and update your registered address? Java Need to file your taxes? Java Need to check your last paycheck, insurance statement? Java Want to gamble through the national gambling provider? Java As stated by others: Need to check your bank account? Java
- xinsight 14y ago
  Same in Germany if you want to file your taxes online. However, using a java applet to login is slow and painful. Maybe this move my Apple will increase support costs and encourage these govt agencies to drop the java requirement.

notatoad 14y ago

I'm curious what you're using that requires flash. as far as i can tell, it's pretty much dead. youtube and vimeo both support HTML5, and other than that it's just ads and games.

riffraff 14y ago
github's "copy url" bit! Also, there is more video on the internet than youtube and vimeo, there is decent software done in flash (such as balsamiq mockups) and sometimes it's the only way to get to some content. I have flash disabled with click2play and I end up starting it _at least_ once a day.
- wfarr 14y ago
  > github's "copy url" bit! That's entirely a limitation imposed by JavaScript not supporting keyboard access. We'd rather not rely on Flash, but we have to in this case.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    I guess you mean "clipboard"? Anyway, I was being facetious, but that does show there are things you can do currently with flash|java|whatever that you can't do with JS. Obviously I'll be happier when it's possible to do everything only with JS.
icebraining 14y ago
The biggest users nowadays are probably porn websites, but you still find it every where on little things. Our national weather observatory, for example, uses a Flash based map to show animated forecasts.
imrehg 14y ago
Loads of websites here in Taiwan. While the rest of the world you could say "moved on", that's just not true, other places keep making the same crappy websites like it's 1997...

borlak 14y ago

Since I was the lone developer using windows at my workplace, I decided to give Apple/OSX a fair shake. The fact OSX was unix based seemed awesome to me (some of my projects are in C). Then began the hell of trying to do anything "unixy" on OSX. Custom libraries just for the mac (custom libev??), needing to install XCode Dev Tools to get gcc compiler(???). Sigh. In the end I just ended up running a CentOS VM in virtualbox, and I do my development there. The ONLY benefit I currently gain from a Mac is creating iOS apps.

astrodust 14y ago
If you were on Windows you'd need to install Visual Studio just to get a compiler. XCode is similar. You haven't seen hell until you try and use Cygwin on Windows to get anything "unixy" done. It sounds like you weren't using MacPorts or Homebrew to build your libraries. They're a lot closer to the distributions you see on Linux and BSD.
- finnw 14y ago
  > If you were on Windows you'd need to install Visual Studio just to get a compiler. Not true, even if you consider only Microsoft software. http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279 http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279 And if my project involves heavy use of shared libraries, I'll take cygwin over macports any day.
  - evilduck 14y ago
    Apple's command line tools for XCode are available as a separate download from XCode from their developer portal too.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    I didn't know Microsoft had a stand-alone compiler, but I'm not even sure what such a thing would be used for other than to be embedded in some other software. How is cygwin any better than a package manager like MacPorts or Homebrew? If you're having this much trouble with shared libraries, you're doing something quite odd. They're usually less obnoxious than their equivalent .DLL files. Apple has gone to great lengths to get fully POSIX certified. As far as the libraries go, they're nearly identical to their Linux or BSD counterparts. The number of platform-specific issues you'll have to deal with when using standard versions of the libraries are usually small. In looking through open source, I always see a lot more of `#ifdef WINDOWS` than I do for anything OS X specific, especially in the networking and threading departments.

LnxPrgr3 14y ago

To be fair, the one thing they don't want to just work is exploits. Neither Flash nor Java has the best security track record. Java lately has been embarrassingly bad: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/critical-bug-discovered-in-newest-java/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/critical-bug-discove... Of course, they were already installing the Java plugin but disabling it by default; not sure why they needed to take the extra step of removing the plugin completely.

Silhouette 14y ago
Neither Flash nor Java has the best security track record. Java lately has been embarrassingly bad People say this sort of thing a lot, and obviously with some justification. However, it's not as if the browsers themselves have a great track record on security either. Firefox had to yank their last update shortly after making it available because of a severe problem, and the update was itself intended to fix quite a few serious security vulnerabilities. Every month we get around to update day for Windows and there are typically a handful of security fixes for IE pushed out. And so on. It seems fairly clear by now that no-one actually makes a really secure browser yet, with or without plug-ins. It's just a problem that we haven't yet learned to solve, at least not without sacrificing some other benefit that the teams making mainstream browsers value more and choose to prioritise. If we need independent security tools to keep browsing safe anyway, is avoiding plug-ins any more than a modest improvement? (And I write this as someone who did once get hit by an undisclosed and unpatched exploit in Java, resulting in a complete reinstall. It wasn't fun. But I don't suppose it would have been any more fun if it had been a zero-day vulnerability in the browser itself.)
- LnxPrgr3 14y ago
  You're right. IIRC, the last non-Java security update I installed updated a bunch of image format libraries to fix exploitable vulnerabilities. We can't even safely decode static image files! I'm not sure how we expect to safely sandbox executable code, whether it's Flash, Java, Javascript, or anything else. Even so, if Java's currently being exploited on a wide scale and Oracle's not having the greatest luck fixing the problems letting malware in, it seems prudent to direct people away from it unless they really, really need it. Any well may be poisoned, but if you know this one is you'd avoid it and warn others, wouldn't you?

acdha 14y ago

> But now I need to manually futz around with flash every two weeks to keep it working ... and now java as well ? Just disable Flash in Safari until Adobe has a Chrome-level automatic update mechanism. I use Chrome for precisely that reason - I haven't had to think about Flash since they started packaging it. I've had Flash disabled in Safari for a long time and almost everything works without it - the only thing I notice regularly missing are the copy/paste convenience helpers on sites like bit.ly. As for Java, I have exactly one site where I need to run it - the Web100 NDT testers - and that's both a niche case and hardly compelling versus the security considerations of using a product from a recklessly inattentive maintainer.

ams6110 14y ago

CUPS these days pretty much "just works" so there goes your other reason...

hnriot 14y ago

OSX still just works, Chrome and Firefox are easy browsers to keep working, there's not really any maintenance required. That said these are not really reasons to switch operating systems, there's nothing particularly difficult about using chrome or Firefox on Linux, or for that matter, printing.