8 ms·

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #35

by Wilya 14y ago

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351]. Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that. I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug

jxc3 14y ago
I too have switched from Linux to Mac in the last two years. Every OS has its annoyances, but the problems you describe are minor/few compared to the problems I experienced routinely on Linux.
- niels_olson 14y ago
  I would agree with this, except for my Cr-48, which just keeps trucking along with Ubuntu. My daughter chooses it over a 2008 MacBook with twice the CPU, twice the RAM, the chic of the Apple logo, etc, etc. That and my 2003 Dell tower running SuSE as a home server refuses to die. A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.
pifflesnort 14y ago
> I suppose I'm just not the target market. Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).
- Wilya 14y ago
  From what I could understand when this bit me, OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default). So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8. I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_forms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form... > OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default). It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted. On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0. On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names. On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage. I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work' > I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic. Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that: - scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware. - The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
    - mturmon 14y ago
      Thanks for this insightful comment. I hadn't known how encodings in filenames are dealt with by CLI utilities. It looks like some versions/builds of rsync are encoding-aware (e.g., http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-filenames-utf-8-latin-1iso-8859-1/ http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-fi...), although some recent builds may not be (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html).
jug6ernaut 14y ago
When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad! With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder. [1]:http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
- simonh 14y ago
  When I came to Mac back in 2007 I assumed my dislike of Finder was just a matter of what I was used to. Six years of using Mac at home and Windows at work and nope. I do like column view, and you'll get my new Mac Mini out of my cold dead hands, but if I had a choice I'd have Windows Explorer on my Mac in a second. No hesitation.
  - revscat 14y ago
    Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.
    - stephenhuey 14y ago
      Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.
      - kayoone 14y ago
        windows explorer has had that feature for years as well
        stephenhuey 14y ago
        Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!
nilkn 14y ago
Finder is indeed a bit disappointing, but it's really pretty minor in comparison to all the much bigger issues I've had with Linux over the years. At least there are very easy solutions for Finder. At the very least, you should check out the free XtraFinder extension.
chc 14y ago
I'm confused. I use share with Windows computers and use files with international characters in their names all the time. What problems did you encounter?
rayiner 14y ago
The people who are limited by Finder use Terminal... The people who can't use Terminal don't need more than Finder. Apple is great at hitting sweet-spots that way.
- jug6ernaut 14y ago
  I really could not disagree with you more. At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser. Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
  - tvon 14y ago
    FWIW, if you use 'screen' (or 'tmux') you won't have to worry about losing terminal windows.
    - miloshadzic 14y ago
      SLAP
  - larrik 14y ago
    Plus, iTerm isn't even Terminal, and Terminal is pretty embarrassing.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I'm interested in your reasoning for why Terminal.app is embarrassing. It seems significantly better than, say, rxvt to me.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - 14y ago
lucian1900 14y ago
TotalFinder makes it a lot less stupid. Not particularly expensive either.
- larrik 14y ago
  The answer to every OS X gripe: "oh, I just replaced that (Apple software) with this (paid software)."
  - dman 14y ago
    But if you have to do the same on linux - "its broken out of the box"
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    That is often the case on all OSes. At least most of them let third-party be first-class, so the replacements are complete. iOS is an obvious failure here.
juiceandjuice 14y ago
Coming from a linux and programming background, I find neither Finder nor Explorer nor Nautilus terribly useful.
meaty 14y ago
Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively. My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta. As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.
- revscat 14y ago
  > My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them. > After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages. Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
    - revscat 14y ago
      If you know the difference between a package and a directory then you should probably know enough to right click. That's pretty minor.
calinet6 14y ago
Cmd-Space "Terminal" and bam, it's Unix.
jsnell 14y ago
No. I used a MacBook Pro (2007ish model) for about 2.5 years. It was a miserable machine, where nothing ever "just worked" [1]. If I'd ever needed to use it more seriously than for occasional VPN access for ssh / a web browser, I'd have ditched it within months rather than wait for it to die of natural causes. [1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted. Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up. I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.
- robryan 14y ago
  The SSD models do a good job of hiding any underlying file system issues. With my MPB from 2010 it would hit a limit after a week or 2 of running where the file system would grind to a halt just about and struggle to browse a directory and be slow to sleep/awake. With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
- threedaymonk 14y ago
  > It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk. I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier! When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).
wamatt 14y ago
I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS. At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder. Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises. [1]http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/ http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/
- thomaslutz 14y ago
  Thanks for the hint, this is truely useful!
- taude 14y ago
  I tried a bunch of Finder enhancers/replacements a year ago. I didn't see this one...thanks.
- gyom 14y ago
  This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX. Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.
MikeKusold 14y ago
> or you want to connect to a Samba server I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ? Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  or ...focus finder forward (click empty desktop or command-tab to finder or click dock finder) and hit command-k. ... or right click dock finder and choose connect to server
- cyclinghacker 14y ago
  Or 'open smb://...' from the terminal. open works with loads of protocols, not just files, for example 'open vnc://host' works out of the box.
__--__ 14y ago
Does mac have problems? sure. But it CAN do what you're suggesting. Just get the right finder alternative or crack open the terminal. Done. What Miguel is talking about in the "just works" category is more basic, like sound and graphics. Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision. On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.
- codygman 14y ago
  Weird, I have debian installed and just plugged in the rgb cable and things were working.
coldtea 14y ago
>Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that. Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003). "It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work. And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations. >I suppose I'm just not the target market. Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.
taude 14y ago
I switched full-time to a Mac a year ago. Multiple-monitor support is pretty horrible, especially when combined with the newer full-screen app mode. It's almost like no developers at Apple use their laptops plugged into a monitor full time. Granted, there's several 3rd party options available, but I hate paying the $10 - $40 for OS-level features that should just work in 2013. When I have my Macbook hooked up to an external monitor and make an app full-screen, the whole desktop slides off of the second monitor, making a dual monitor setup frustrating. Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc... My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere. Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues. These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.) Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.

by Wilya 14y ago

jxc3 14y ago

I too have switched from Linux to Mac in the last two years. Every OS has its annoyances, but the problems you describe are minor/few compared to the problems I experienced routinely on Linux.

niels_olson 14y ago
I would agree with this, except for my Cr-48, which just keeps trucking along with Ubuntu. My daughter chooses it over a 2008 MacBook with twice the CPU, twice the RAM, the chic of the Apple logo, etc, etc. That and my 2003 Dell tower running SuSE as a home server refuses to die. A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.

pifflesnort 14y ago

> I suppose I'm just not the target market. Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).

Wilya 14y ago
From what I could understand when this bit me, OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default). So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8. I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_forms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form... > OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default). It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted. On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0. On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names. On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage. I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work' > I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic. Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that: - scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware. - The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
  - mturmon 14y ago
    Thanks for this insightful comment. I hadn't known how encodings in filenames are dealt with by CLI utilities. It looks like some versions/builds of rsync are encoding-aware (e.g., http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-filenames-utf-8-latin-1iso-8859-1/ http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-fi...), although some recent builds may not be (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html).

jug6ernaut 14y ago

When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad! With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder. [1]:http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

simonh 14y ago
When I came to Mac back in 2007 I assumed my dislike of Finder was just a matter of what I was used to. Six years of using Mac at home and Windows at work and nope. I do like column view, and you'll get my new Mac Mini out of my cold dead hands, but if I had a choice I'd have Windows Explorer on my Mac in a second. No hesitation.
- revscat 14y ago
  Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.
  - stephenhuey 14y ago
    Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.
    - kayoone 14y ago
      windows explorer has had that feature for years as well
      - stephenhuey 14y ago
        Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!

nilkn 14y ago

Finder is indeed a bit disappointing, but it's really pretty minor in comparison to all the much bigger issues I've had with Linux over the years. At least there are very easy solutions for Finder. At the very least, you should check out the free XtraFinder extension.

chc 14y ago

I'm confused. I use share with Windows computers and use files with international characters in their names all the time. What problems did you encounter?

rayiner 14y ago

The people who are limited by Finder use Terminal... The people who can't use Terminal don't need more than Finder. Apple is great at hitting sweet-spots that way.

jug6ernaut 14y ago
I really could not disagree with you more. At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser. Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
- tvon 14y ago
  FWIW, if you use 'screen' (or 'tmux') you won't have to worry about losing terminal windows.
  - miloshadzic 14y ago
    SLAP
- larrik 14y ago
  Plus, iTerm isn't even Terminal, and Terminal is pretty embarrassing.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    I'm interested in your reasoning for why Terminal.app is embarrassing. It seems significantly better than, say, rxvt to me.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - 14y ago

lucian1900 14y ago

TotalFinder makes it a lot less stupid. Not particularly expensive either.

larrik 14y ago
The answer to every OS X gripe: "oh, I just replaced that (Apple software) with this (paid software)."
- dman 14y ago
  But if you have to do the same on linux - "its broken out of the box"
- lucian1900 14y ago
  That is often the case on all OSes. At least most of them let third-party be first-class, so the replacements are complete. iOS is an obvious failure here.

juiceandjuice 14y ago

Coming from a linux and programming background, I find neither Finder nor Explorer nor Nautilus terribly useful.

meaty 14y ago

Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively. My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta. As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.

revscat 14y ago
> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them. > After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
- calinet6 14y ago
  It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages. Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
  - revscat 14y ago
    If you know the difference between a package and a directory then you should probably know enough to right click. That's pretty minor.

calinet6 14y ago

Cmd-Space "Terminal" and bam, it's Unix.

jsnell 14y ago

No. I used a MacBook Pro (2007ish model) for about 2.5 years. It was a miserable machine, where nothing ever "just worked" [1]. If I'd ever needed to use it more seriously than for occasional VPN access for ssh / a web browser, I'd have ditched it within months rather than wait for it to die of natural causes. [1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted. Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up. I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.

robryan 14y ago
The SSD models do a good job of hiding any underlying file system issues. With my MPB from 2010 it would hit a limit after a week or 2 of running where the file system would grind to a halt just about and struggle to browse a directory and be slow to sleep/awake. With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
threedaymonk 14y ago
> It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk. I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier! When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).

wamatt 14y ago

I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS. At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder. Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises. [1]http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/ http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/

thomaslutz 14y ago
Thanks for the hint, this is truely useful!
taude 14y ago
I tried a bunch of Finder enhancers/replacements a year ago. I didn't see this one...thanks.
gyom 14y ago
This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX. Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.

MikeKusold 14y ago

> or you want to connect to a Samba server I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ? Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?

stock_toaster 14y ago
or ...focus finder forward (click empty desktop or command-tab to finder or click dock finder) and hit command-k. ... or right click dock finder and choose connect to server
cyclinghacker 14y ago
Or 'open smb://...' from the terminal. open works with loads of protocols, not just files, for example 'open vnc://host' works out of the box.

__--__ 14y ago

Does mac have problems? sure. But it CAN do what you're suggesting. Just get the right finder alternative or crack open the terminal. Done. What Miguel is talking about in the "just works" category is more basic, like sound and graphics. Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision. On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.

codygman 14y ago
Weird, I have debian installed and just plugged in the rgb cable and things were working.

coldtea 14y ago

>Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that. Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003). "It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work. And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations. >I suppose I'm just not the target market. Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.

taude 14y ago

I switched full-time to a Mac a year ago. Multiple-monitor support is pretty horrible, especially when combined with the newer full-screen app mode. It's almost like no developers at Apple use their laptops plugged into a monitor full time. Granted, there's several 3rd party options available, but I hate paying the $10 - $40 for OS-level features that should just work in 2013. When I have my Macbook hooked up to an external monitor and make an app full-screen, the whole desktop slides off of the second monitor, making a dual monitor setup frustrating. Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc... My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere. Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues. These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.) Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.