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Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting for a free, open OS, remember? I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc a

Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting for a free, open OS, remember? I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. I do understand that "normal" people love Apple, but I just can not understand why coder people, who grew up learning to code in a GNU world (like me) can succumb to go Apple.

mwfunk 13y ago
Probably because different people have different opinions on stuff like: pretty much everything you just said, who "we" are, what people ought to be fighting for, and how black and white all of that stuff is (answer: none of it, not even a teensy tiny scrap of it).
dkulchenko 13y ago
I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X. I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros' improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many others on HN. (This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)
- AndreasFrom 13y ago
  From the outside it seems that Mac developers have just as much trouble, but with things like homebrew and developer tools in general. At least if doing anything else than web programming. Is this wrong?
  - marssaxman 13y ago
    I do mostly platform-independent C++ stuff, using Mac OS for my day-to-day work. No web development. I am unfamiliar with homebrew. What sort of troubles have you heard about?
    - AndreasFrom 13y ago
      BSD tools instead of GNU that behave differently and old compiler versions. And generally incompatibilities that need to be ironed out, but I'm glad to be mistaken.
  - aroman 13y ago
    Yes. The package management is excellent via Brew (similar to archlinux's system). The "trouble" comes from getting the core OS to behave and play nice with the hardware. That is rarely an issue with Apple's platform, speaking from personal comparative experience. Also, Apple's SDK for their own platforms is the currently the best around, bar none.
  - cjensen 13y ago
    If you try to continue to run Linux apps via various Mac-packaging systems, then yes you are going to have a bad time. It's the same packages and upgrade interdependencies as on Linux, plus extra breakage due to running on not-Linux. The way forward on a Mac is to run Mac native applications. Not really a surprise -- a Windows user who switches to Linux but wants to run all the same old stuff via Wine would be better served by switching to native apps where possible.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      I've tried that, but the officially blessed Mac way of doing package management, the App Store, has almost none of what I want in it. How am I supposed to switch if there is nothing to switch to? Say I want to stop using Audacity and switch to a proper Mac solution. What do I pull from the App Store?
      - ceol 13y ago
        GarageBand? Logic Pro X? Reason? Cubase? Ableton Live? My personal favorite is Renoise, since it's cross-platform. Any number of DAWs are available on OS X — you just have to pay for them, sometimes.
        Yetanfou 13y ago
        but... where's the source? Those are all closed, proprietary programs. They might be fine in their own right, but they are not free software. Audacity is free software, as is Ardour. The better answer to this question is probably that Mac OS X is not the best platform to run free software on, just like Microsoft Windows is suboptimal at best. Given that those platforms are closed and proprietary this is not that surprising. If you want to run free software, start at the bottom - the kernel. It is not like there is a dearth of choice when it comes to running free kernels after all.
      - cjensen 13y ago
        Downloading executables remains a blessed way of downloading stuff for the Mac; I use Audacity. I wish more free software developers would pay the $99 tithe to get their stuff added to the Mac App Store though. (Any free software guys here? I'll pay the $99 for the first one to email me at cjensen@acm.org)
- azakai 13y ago
  > I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works. I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That might be just anecdotal, of course.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghswa 13y ago
    I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".
    - pavanky 13y ago
      Some would say that is the meaning of being stagnant. If you want something that "just works" in that the environment is recognisable, use something like Redhat. You caught Ubuntu (or Fedora or other distributions that moved to GNOME 3) were on GNOME 2 greater part of the last decade. A breaking UI change had to be done at some point, and it happened to be 2 years ago. Even on macs, there was a huge overhaul going from OS9 to OSX in 2001. You can make a point saying that you don't like the new UI. That will be a much more sound argument than saying the environment is changing from one release to the next.
    - YokoZar 13y ago
      If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.
      - ghswa 13y ago
        Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul. My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity. My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.
- takluyver 13y ago
  In case anyone reading this doesn't already know about them, there are options for getting computers designed to work with Linux. I've heard good things about System 76, and Dell now offer a developer-oriented laptop with Ubuntu. These options probably aren't yet as polished as Macs, but if you want convenience and still care about an open source OS, give them your support. They won't get better without demand from people like us.
  - fixxer 13y ago
    I've never had a problem getting Linux to work on a laptop. That includes Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, even HP EliteBook (pain in the ass, but running LMDE quite nicely with NVidia). Is the argument that those machines are bad because they ship with Windows? I'm a huge hater of MS-anything (I can not quantify my hate of Windoze), but I don't see a valid argument to support overpaying for a slow System 76 machine when I can get my i7 Toshiba for $879 and put whatever OS I want (including a hackintosh VM).
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      Check out Zareason - the prices are pretty reasonable. I like buying from them because they've vetted every part of the hardware to make sure that any distro you want will work on it, and they'll find you the packages to install if the weird one you chose doesn't have them. I actually do the reverse - buy a Zareason and install Windows on it for freelance projects that I need Windows to maintain, because I know that after the maintenance window has ended on those, I can throw Debian on it without issues.
    - takluyver 13y ago
      The impression I get is that major Linux distros will work on almost any laptop, but if you want it to work well (good battery life, flawless suspend/resume, no issues with graphics drivers), you still need to think about your hardware. I don't believe that Linux can ever go mainstream through just being installed on Windows machines: for most people it's just too much effort for too little reward. And for reasons both practical and principled, I want Linux to be a mainstream option. So I support people selling computers with Linux.
- kunai 13y ago
  I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly. Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).
  - hnriot 13y ago
    if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.
    - kunai 13y ago
      Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.
      - gohrt 13y ago
        Can you switch without a full reboot?
        hayksaakian 13y ago
        I would also like to know this.
        agravier 13y ago
        I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.
- stefanix 13y ago
  I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)
  - DigitalJack 13y ago
    I think you may have found the one user experience issue that linux handles better.
  - sounds 13y ago
    Pro Tip: if you don't use iTunes (ever) then you can use this. The next time Software Update asks you to update iTunes: 1. uncheck iTunes from the list of updates 2. click the help menu, search for "ignore update" and click on one of the options. (I don't remember exactly what it's called.) It's a hidden way to tell Software Update to never bother you with iTunes updates again. Warning: This will leave you exposed to any security issues in iTunes, so don't run iTunes after you've shut off its updates.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I was in the same boat. Switched from mixed windows/linux desktops to Macs around 2007 or so. Switched back to Linux a couple years ago, though, and honestly it's as much an out of the box experience as OSX ever has been. Mint in particular is stellar out of the box. You do have to be somewhat careful of the hardware you buy, but arguing that having to buy exclusively Apple hardware is somehow better than exclusively buying, say, IBM hardware to maintain compatibility with your OS is pure sophistry.
- ams6110 13y ago
  It's not perfect. Mountain Lion crashed for me just two days ago. Just based on my perceptions, I'd say Mac OS stability has declined since they moved off of PPC.
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.
- gnuvince 13y ago
  For what it's worth, I installed Debian Wheezy on my ThinkPad T420 last week, after years of being away from Debian GNU/Linux (I got caught by the Ubuntu bug), and I must say that I was extremely impressed; my video card, sound card, ethernet card, webcam, microphone, trackpad, trackpoint, SNES and Xbox360 controllers all worked out of the box. I had to apt-get install firmware-realtek, a non-free package to get Wifi working, but once I had downloaded it, my wireless card worked without any further configuration. As for stability, I think Debian's reputation for being rock solid is well established and deserved. I'm extremely happy with the setup I have and with how little effort I had to expand to get it. If you have an older machine lying around, I'd heartily recommend giving it a whirl.
- sspiff 13y ago
  I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked. I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.
- username42 13y ago
  I also need an OS that just work and that gets out of my way. I have used ubuntu until the beginning of this year without fiddling into the system. This is the first year that I have to fiddle because I can not cope with unity. I have tried linux mint with cinnamon, ubuntu with cinnamon. It works but it is not very polished, it looks very old. This week, I have just installed ubuntu-gnome (gnome 3.8) for the computer of my old father. I has required some effort to learn how to configure it. At first, it looks fine. I just hope I will not encounter any problem.
- Intermernet 13y ago
  Pretty sure Linus is on a Chromebook Pixel now.
general_failure 13y ago
Yeah, it's truly sad and I don't get it either. In fact, I was in a conference a couple of weeks back and people were mocked for using Windows and especially Linux. Devs were asking others to get a 'real' OS. Practically 90% of the conference had Macs.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  Mocking people for using Windows, Linux or whatever is a childish/youngish thing to do. Most people grow out of that phase, but you gotta love the young programmers coming up. Apple has been pretty clever about exploiting the tribal nature of these (mostly) young men.
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    Apple has been pretty clever about exploiting a lot of scary things in human nature! ...and yeah, we all "loved" to see those things at their best. That's something over which I have a hard time to get over, even now.
- randomracker 13y ago
  Windows can't open a raw socket. I find that really irks me for some reason. Overall, I find Windows superior after using Macs for a couple of years. The UI of Windows feels much better for getting things done, there's more third party software, and Apple's software engineering is amateurish compared to Microsoft. But then I remember, you can't open a raw socket. I'm also steeped in Linux from the olden days, and the win32 meets Linux ports get to be a bit of a pain... cygwin path conventions, DOS path conventions, emacs port path conventions... use a backslash here, forward slash there.. that stuff can get to be a serious pain if you bring a lot of UNIX style stuff to your Windows work. Even though OS X doesn't hold a candle to Debian for well-packaged open-source software, big plus marks for not hitting this UNIX-meets-Windows compatibility nightmare. 90% of your peers using a Mac is a good reason to use a Mac. But I have to admit people feeling superior for using a Mac is ridiculous.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
glhaynes 13y ago
You think I'm "fighting for a free, open OS" just because I'm on the same site as you? (The same site that looked like http://hhn.domador.net/2011/10/05/23/ http://hhn.domador.net/2011/10/05/23/ after Steve Jobs died?)
aroman 13y ago
tl;dr linux + most laptops = subpar I spent years using Linux on the desktop. I wrote software for it, was active in the community, and was an active core contributor to well-known distribution. I love Linux desktops. Yet I stopped using them when I got my Macbook Air (before you flame me for using that machine, Linus himself uses one [0]). It's an absolutely phenomenal machine for my use. Sadly, however, running Linux on it is a majorly sub-par experience. Touchpad drivers are awful (as is software which can support it), battery life is abysmal, and overall it's a pain in the ass. This is coming from someone who happily spent days configuring Gentoo and Exherbo[1] on his desktop just for fun. True, I could invest in a laptop which is known to play nice with Linux, but frankly, there exists no machine on the market today which can compete with the Macbook Air for my use (ultra-portability, durability, extreme battery life, great screen and solid performance). In short, I "succumb" because the portable hardware is the best. Plain and simple. [0] http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-i-love-my-macbook-air/ http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds... [1] http://www.exherbo.org/ http://www.exherbo.org/
- stefanix 13y ago
  Moved from MacBook Air/OSX to Ubuntu and super happy about it. The touchpad was tricky though. I had to deactivate the lower 20% (for clicking) and untrain me resting my thumb on the pad.
  - aroman 13y ago
    How's the battery life? How do you live without multitouch gestures? Any hardware incompatibilities?
    - Tmmrn 13y ago
      Do you need to "live without multitouch gestures"? I don't have a macbook, so I have never tested it, but the Archlinux wiki speaks of two drivers xf86-input-multitouch and a fork xf86-input-mtrack https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Macbook#Touchpad https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Macbook#Touchpad
cjensen 13y ago
OSX lets me get more stuff done than Linux (or FreeBSD, which is what I used to use) while maintaining the ability to freely develop programs in a simple *nix environment. Apple has yet to sue anyone other than blatant and uninspired copyists, so I just don't care about the issues you feel so strongly about. My enthusiasm for Free Software died years ago thanks to the ridiculous amounts of CADT (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) in the Free GUIs. Constant change without benefit is just not interesting to me. Meanwhile, Apple has been advancing in really important ways that are not being sufficiently imitated by Windows and Linux: user-friendly backup; removal of the mental model where "file on disk" is somehow different than "file in editor"; unlimited file versioning; a sweet app store; mandatory code-signing.
- dirkgently 13y ago
  > Apple has yet to sue anyone other than blatant and uninspired copyists, so I just don't care about the issues you feel so strongly about. Where do we start? Lets see: Apple v/s New York City over 'GreeNYC' logo : http://www.widespotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/greenyc290.png http://www.widespotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/gree... Apple v/s Victoria School of Business and Technology over this logo : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Victoria_School_of_Business_and_Technology_Inc_Logo.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Victoria_...) Apple v/s Woolworths Limited over this logo - http://www.topnews.in/files/Woolworths.gif http://www.topnews.in/files/Woolworths.gif Apple v/s Amazon for the use of "App" And let's not talk about the abuse of Rounded Corners (TM)(R)(C)
  - cjensen 13y ago
    That would appear to be standard "you must defend your trademark or else it is invalid" lawsuits. Those cases have nothing to do with software freedom.
    - dirkgently 13y ago
      Oh yes, those logos were so very close to Apple logo. Common bully behavior is worse then propitiatory software madness.
andrewescott 13y ago
Is there any easy way to do native iOS application development with Objective-C if you don't run OSX?
- shitlord 13y ago
  Alternatively, "is there any easy way to do Windows Mobile development with C++/CLI if you don't run Windows?" Obviously, you're not going to have a good time writing code native to a particular OS if you aren't working with that OS. At best, your experience will be subpar. imo
  - kalleboo 13y ago
    Android
GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
Not all of us drank the GNU koolaid. I for one tend to chose other opensource alternatives where possible. Not that I'm advocating for Apple. I've been perfectly content for years using FreeBSD as my primary server and desktop OS. IMO it works better than Linux too. For example, at $WORK we run SLES 11 w/ your choice of DE. I use KDE4as I do w/ FreeBSD. KDE4 on FreeBSD has been far more stable for me than SLES(though in SLES's partial defense, it's packages are quite far behind). Anyways, I'm glad to see FreeBSD leaving the GNU toolchain and userland behind. PS -- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has it backwards. A FreeBSD userland w/ a linux kernel might actually be interesting to me.
- Roboprog 13y ago
  Curious: what problems in the GNU userland utilities do the BSD utilities address? (not saying that there aren't any, just that I don't use the BSD stuff any more enough to know -- e.g., it's been about 20 years since I was using "Ultrix" and the like)
  - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
    > what problems in the GNU userland utilities do the BSD utilities address? Simplicy for one since BSD utils are developed in a mostly non-fractured enviroment. I gave one example in a previous post. That isn't the end of the story, but it's a good start. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640751
w1ntermute 13y ago
Yeah, that shit pisses me off so much. I'm fucking surrounded by people using Macs - it is a complete monoculture and it drives me crazy.
- pbsdp 13y ago
  That's actually how I feel about Linux; it's a social monoculture and nobody seems to care a whit about anyone that isn't an ubernerd that wants to fiddle endlessly with a poorly designed/integrated OS.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    ...except Canonical has done a ton of work over the last decade to make Linux accessible to casual users. That said, your viewpoint is the party line in the webdev crowd. And at this point, I'm not sure why I should give a flying fuck, because there isn't anything that Canonical or the Linux community can do to convince Apple devotees otherwise. I've been using Linux for the past several years without any issues with its design or integration, and I haven't had to "fiddle endlessly". And I'll continue to do so, regardless of what most everyone else thinks and says. Although it is quite hilarious when people express amazement at the fact that I don't own any Apple products.
    - pbsdp 13y ago
      I would be convinced if Canonical: - Dropped the entire Linux desktop software stack. - Wrote a well-integrated top-down designed set of frameworks that provided a consistent API for desktop software, with binary-level ABI compatibility across major releases of the operating system. - Promoted and encouraged the distribution of standalone applications that included all their dependencies, including distribution via an app store. - Dropped the use of package management for anything other than OS components, especially for managing application dependencies. - Leveraged their well-designed set of frameworks to advance the state of the art and simplify the lives of developers, making it easier to ship "great software" for their platform as compared to others. As it is right now, Linux is a cess pool of poorly maintained, unstable, poorly designed, rapidly shifting crap. There's almost no centralized vision, and what centralized vision does exist is almost entirely co-opted and captured by massive ubernerds that don't seem to understand the first thing about producing a viable platform that end-user application developers would want to target. What Canonical has done is put lipstick on a pig; it's not enough to throw money at making the operating system acceptably attractive to just end users.
btilly 13y ago
Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting for a free, open OS, remember? No, I don't remember that. Because I never was. I strongly dislike Microsoft. But I was just as happy on Solaris as Debian. I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. I do understand that "normal" people love Apple, but I just can not understand why coder people, who grew up learning to code in a GNU world (like me) can succumb to go Apple. I learned to code from Perl. Which was never so dogmatic about the whole GNU thing.
mbell 13y ago
I used linux exclusively for ~7 or 8 years on both laptop and desktop, I'm now a Mac user. I could write a long winded post with all the reasoning, but it really comes down to this: There are a number of things open source software does incredibly well, building user experiences is not one of them.
shirro 13y ago
The laptop hardware mostly. I value command line tools above the GUI and ports, then homebrew have been sufficient along with VMs and VPS providers for my needs. OSX is just a window manager for my iTerms and Chrome windows so is entirely replaceable. I would swap back to a Linux environment in a blink if there was a distro/hardware combination that worked as smoothly.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  Look at Thinkpads. Build quality is excellent, and better than Apple's. The hardware is well supported in Linux, and the lots of hackers use them, so help is always a Google search away. They are mostly fugly though (industrial design, built like a tank, looks like one)
Mikeb85 13y ago
Because the hardware is attractive, it's well supported and the OS is decent, and it still runs all the open source stuff they like, as well as proprietary stuff they like. I personally run SUSE on a Thinkpad, I prefer Linux to OSX and Windows, and love Thinkpad hardware (the keyboard is the best I've ever used). I can however understand why Apple stuff is attractive. I've also heard that Linux is easier than OSX when it comes to installing languages, tools, etc..., but OSX is easier when it comes to things like Skype, Office, and of course proprietary software. I've found using Linux full time to be painless and enjoyable though.
sergiotapia 13y ago
I'm wasn't _fighting_ for anything - I'm sure there are others. I just bought the best machine for my money. The machine that would allow me to do my job better. I don't care at all about free philosophy and other things of that nature in software.
duaneb 13y ago
> I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. It's by far the OS I'm most productive in, and all the parts I care about (SSH) are open source.
lotsofcows 13y ago
I'm not fighting for a free, open OS. I'm supporting a good balance of usable tools in a capitalist system. OSX is the most usable tool I've been fortunate enough to be able to afford. Given a choice for important data, I'll also go with open source. My OS doesn't fall into that requirement - only the apps that run on it. The "hacker" in "hacker news" has little to do with any traditional meaning of hacker. I'm not sure why it's in there at all really.
- lrem 13y ago
  Oh, it is exactly the traditional meaning. Just that instead of hacking on some OSS projects, people here tend to hack on their own (hopefully) commercial stuff. But hacking remains.
  - lotsofcows 13y ago
    Hacking has a strong connotation with openness. Look at the outcry when Bill Gates complained about people copying his stuff. Hacking is about stretching things beyond their designed limits. Who the "things" belong to is usually irrelevant.
- lotsofcows 13y ago
  That "also" should have been an "always".
- rsynnott 13y ago
  > The "hacker" in "hacker news" has little to do with any traditional meaning of hacker. Well, the _traditional_ meaning would largely predate the availability of Linux, anyway...
jawngee 13y ago
I grew up learning to code in the BASIC on Apple ][ world, before GNU existed. I guess, for some of us, the low amount of friction that Apple provides is worth the illusory premium that people attach to it. I never signed up to fight for an open or free OS, I could really care less if one exists or not. I like Linux, but I don't get religious about these things because being religious about these things would affect my bottom line. I use it on the server, but I would never use it on the desktop, mostly because of aesthetics. Linux looks like shit to me. It's like a Toyota to a Mercedes. Toyota might actually have superior mechanics, but the Mercedes drives so nicely. And then there is Objective-C. After 20 years of C++, C#, C, Delphi - I dunno, I can't describe the love I feel for Objective-C.
protomyth 13y ago
It is a BSD and has the nicest UI. Your fight wasn't mine.
Shorel 13y ago
Hackers are not licensing zealots. At least not all of them. Some of us are more awed by technical prowess than by anything else, and OSX has done some amazing stuff. Quartz compositing, the migration from IBM to Intel processors using Rosetta, Time Machine, etc. All of that is great from a technical point of view, and you should at the very least acknowledge it as an inspiration. If you write code, that's it. However, if you mean the iPod/iPad/iPhone locked stuff, yes, by all means fuck Apple.

mwfunk 13y ago

Probably because different people have different opinions on stuff like: pretty much everything you just said, who "we" are, what people ought to be fighting for, and how black and white all of that stuff is (answer: none of it, not even a teensy tiny scrap of it).

dkulchenko 13y ago

I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X. I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros' improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many others on HN. (This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)

AndreasFrom 13y ago
From the outside it seems that Mac developers have just as much trouble, but with things like homebrew and developer tools in general. At least if doing anything else than web programming. Is this wrong?
- marssaxman 13y ago
  I do mostly platform-independent C++ stuff, using Mac OS for my day-to-day work. No web development. I am unfamiliar with homebrew. What sort of troubles have you heard about?
  - AndreasFrom 13y ago
    BSD tools instead of GNU that behave differently and old compiler versions. And generally incompatibilities that need to be ironed out, but I'm glad to be mistaken.
- aroman 13y ago
  Yes. The package management is excellent via Brew (similar to archlinux's system). The "trouble" comes from getting the core OS to behave and play nice with the hardware. That is rarely an issue with Apple's platform, speaking from personal comparative experience. Also, Apple's SDK for their own platforms is the currently the best around, bar none.
- cjensen 13y ago
  If you try to continue to run Linux apps via various Mac-packaging systems, then yes you are going to have a bad time. It's the same packages and upgrade interdependencies as on Linux, plus extra breakage due to running on not-Linux. The way forward on a Mac is to run Mac native applications. Not really a surprise -- a Windows user who switches to Linux but wants to run all the same old stuff via Wine would be better served by switching to native apps where possible.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I've tried that, but the officially blessed Mac way of doing package management, the App Store, has almost none of what I want in it. How am I supposed to switch if there is nothing to switch to? Say I want to stop using Audacity and switch to a proper Mac solution. What do I pull from the App Store?
    - ceol 13y ago
      GarageBand? Logic Pro X? Reason? Cubase? Ableton Live? My personal favorite is Renoise, since it's cross-platform. Any number of DAWs are available on OS X — you just have to pay for them, sometimes.
      - Yetanfou 13y ago
        but... where's the source? Those are all closed, proprietary programs. They might be fine in their own right, but they are not free software. Audacity is free software, as is Ardour. The better answer to this question is probably that Mac OS X is not the best platform to run free software on, just like Microsoft Windows is suboptimal at best. Given that those platforms are closed and proprietary this is not that surprising. If you want to run free software, start at the bottom - the kernel. It is not like there is a dearth of choice when it comes to running free kernels after all.
    - cjensen 13y ago
      Downloading executables remains a blessed way of downloading stuff for the Mac; I use Audacity. I wish more free software developers would pay the $99 tithe to get their stuff added to the Mac App Store though. (Any free software guys here? I'll pay the $99 for the first one to email me at cjensen@acm.org)
azakai 13y ago
> I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works. I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That might be just anecdotal, of course.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ghswa 13y ago
  I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".
  - pavanky 13y ago
    Some would say that is the meaning of being stagnant. If you want something that "just works" in that the environment is recognisable, use something like Redhat. You caught Ubuntu (or Fedora or other distributions that moved to GNOME 3) were on GNOME 2 greater part of the last decade. A breaking UI change had to be done at some point, and it happened to be 2 years ago. Even on macs, there was a huge overhaul going from OS9 to OSX in 2001. You can make a point saying that you don't like the new UI. That will be a much more sound argument than saying the environment is changing from one release to the next.
  - YokoZar 13y ago
    If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.
    - ghswa 13y ago
      Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul. My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity. My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.
takluyver 13y ago
In case anyone reading this doesn't already know about them, there are options for getting computers designed to work with Linux. I've heard good things about System 76, and Dell now offer a developer-oriented laptop with Ubuntu. These options probably aren't yet as polished as Macs, but if you want convenience and still care about an open source OS, give them your support. They won't get better without demand from people like us.
- fixxer 13y ago
  I've never had a problem getting Linux to work on a laptop. That includes Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, even HP EliteBook (pain in the ass, but running LMDE quite nicely with NVidia). Is the argument that those machines are bad because they ship with Windows? I'm a huge hater of MS-anything (I can not quantify my hate of Windoze), but I don't see a valid argument to support overpaying for a slow System 76 machine when I can get my i7 Toshiba for $879 and put whatever OS I want (including a hackintosh VM).
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Check out Zareason - the prices are pretty reasonable. I like buying from them because they've vetted every part of the hardware to make sure that any distro you want will work on it, and they'll find you the packages to install if the weird one you chose doesn't have them. I actually do the reverse - buy a Zareason and install Windows on it for freelance projects that I need Windows to maintain, because I know that after the maintenance window has ended on those, I can throw Debian on it without issues.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    The impression I get is that major Linux distros will work on almost any laptop, but if you want it to work well (good battery life, flawless suspend/resume, no issues with graphics drivers), you still need to think about your hardware. I don't believe that Linux can ever go mainstream through just being installed on Windows machines: for most people it's just too much effort for too little reward. And for reasons both practical and principled, I want Linux to be a mainstream option. So I support people selling computers with Linux.
kunai 13y ago
I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly. Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).
- hnriot 13y ago
  if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.
  - kunai 13y ago
    Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.
    - gohrt 13y ago
      Can you switch without a full reboot?
      - hayksaakian 13y ago
        I would also like to know this.
      - agravier 13y ago
        I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.
stefanix 13y ago
I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  I think you may have found the one user experience issue that linux handles better.
- sounds 13y ago
  Pro Tip: if you don't use iTunes (ever) then you can use this. The next time Software Update asks you to update iTunes: 1. uncheck iTunes from the list of updates 2. click the help menu, search for "ignore update" and click on one of the options. (I don't remember exactly what it's called.) It's a hidden way to tell Software Update to never bother you with iTunes updates again. Warning: This will leave you exposed to any security issues in iTunes, so don't run iTunes after you've shut off its updates.
stormbrew 13y ago
I was in the same boat. Switched from mixed windows/linux desktops to Macs around 2007 or so. Switched back to Linux a couple years ago, though, and honestly it's as much an out of the box experience as OSX ever has been. Mint in particular is stellar out of the box. You do have to be somewhat careful of the hardware you buy, but arguing that having to buy exclusively Apple hardware is somehow better than exclusively buying, say, IBM hardware to maintain compatibility with your OS is pure sophistry.
ams6110 13y ago
It's not perfect. Mountain Lion crashed for me just two days ago. Just based on my perceptions, I'd say Mac OS stability has declined since they moved off of PPC.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.
gnuvince 13y ago
For what it's worth, I installed Debian Wheezy on my ThinkPad T420 last week, after years of being away from Debian GNU/Linux (I got caught by the Ubuntu bug), and I must say that I was extremely impressed; my video card, sound card, ethernet card, webcam, microphone, trackpad, trackpoint, SNES and Xbox360 controllers all worked out of the box. I had to apt-get install firmware-realtek, a non-free package to get Wifi working, but once I had downloaded it, my wireless card worked without any further configuration. As for stability, I think Debian's reputation for being rock solid is well established and deserved. I'm extremely happy with the setup I have and with how little effort I had to expand to get it. If you have an older machine lying around, I'd heartily recommend giving it a whirl.
sspiff 13y ago
I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked. I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.
username42 13y ago
I also need an OS that just work and that gets out of my way. I have used ubuntu until the beginning of this year without fiddling into the system. This is the first year that I have to fiddle because I can not cope with unity. I have tried linux mint with cinnamon, ubuntu with cinnamon. It works but it is not very polished, it looks very old. This week, I have just installed ubuntu-gnome (gnome 3.8) for the computer of my old father. I has required some effort to learn how to configure it. At first, it looks fine. I just hope I will not encounter any problem.
Intermernet 13y ago
Pretty sure Linus is on a Chromebook Pixel now.

general_failure 13y ago

Yeah, it's truly sad and I don't get it either. In fact, I was in a conference a couple of weeks back and people were mocked for using Windows and especially Linux. Devs were asking others to get a 'real' OS. Practically 90% of the conference had Macs.

michaelwww 13y ago
Mocking people for using Windows, Linux or whatever is a childish/youngish thing to do. Most people grow out of that phase, but you gotta love the young programmers coming up. Apple has been pretty clever about exploiting the tribal nature of these (mostly) young men.
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  Apple has been pretty clever about exploiting a lot of scary things in human nature! ...and yeah, we all "loved" to see those things at their best. That's something over which I have a hard time to get over, even now.
randomracker 13y ago
Windows can't open a raw socket. I find that really irks me for some reason. Overall, I find Windows superior after using Macs for a couple of years. The UI of Windows feels much better for getting things done, there's more third party software, and Apple's software engineering is amateurish compared to Microsoft. But then I remember, you can't open a raw socket. I'm also steeped in Linux from the olden days, and the win32 meets Linux ports get to be a bit of a pain... cygwin path conventions, DOS path conventions, emacs port path conventions... use a backslash here, forward slash there.. that stuff can get to be a serious pain if you bring a lot of UNIX style stuff to your Windows work. Even though OS X doesn't hold a candle to Debian for well-packaged open-source software, big plus marks for not hitting this UNIX-meets-Windows compatibility nightmare. 90% of your peers using a Mac is a good reason to use a Mac. But I have to admit people feeling superior for using a Mac is ridiculous.
- Dylan16807 13y ago

glhaynes 13y ago

You think I'm "fighting for a free, open OS" just because I'm on the same site as you? (The same site that looked like http://hhn.domador.net/2011/10/05/23/ http://hhn.domador.net/2011/10/05/23/ after Steve Jobs died?)

aroman 13y ago

tl;dr linux + most laptops = subpar I spent years using Linux on the desktop. I wrote software for it, was active in the community, and was an active core contributor to well-known distribution. I love Linux desktops. Yet I stopped using them when I got my Macbook Air (before you flame me for using that machine, Linus himself uses one [0]). It's an absolutely phenomenal machine for my use. Sadly, however, running Linux on it is a majorly sub-par experience. Touchpad drivers are awful (as is software which can support it), battery life is abysmal, and overall it's a pain in the ass. This is coming from someone who happily spent days configuring Gentoo and Exherbo[1] on his desktop just for fun. True, I could invest in a laptop which is known to play nice with Linux, but frankly, there exists no machine on the market today which can compete with the Macbook Air for my use (ultra-portability, durability, extreme battery life, great screen and solid performance). In short, I "succumb" because the portable hardware is the best. Plain and simple. [0] http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-i-love-my-macbook-air/ http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds... [1] http://www.exherbo.org/ http://www.exherbo.org/

stefanix 13y ago
Moved from MacBook Air/OSX to Ubuntu and super happy about it. The touchpad was tricky though. I had to deactivate the lower 20% (for clicking) and untrain me resting my thumb on the pad.
- aroman 13y ago
  How's the battery life? How do you live without multitouch gestures? Any hardware incompatibilities?
  - Tmmrn 13y ago
    Do you need to "live without multitouch gestures"? I don't have a macbook, so I have never tested it, but the Archlinux wiki speaks of two drivers xf86-input-multitouch and a fork xf86-input-mtrack https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Macbook#Touchpad https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Macbook#Touchpad

cjensen 13y ago

OSX lets me get more stuff done than Linux (or FreeBSD, which is what I used to use) while maintaining the ability to freely develop programs in a simple *nix environment. Apple has yet to sue anyone other than blatant and uninspired copyists, so I just don't care about the issues you feel so strongly about. My enthusiasm for Free Software died years ago thanks to the ridiculous amounts of CADT (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) in the Free GUIs. Constant change without benefit is just not interesting to me. Meanwhile, Apple has been advancing in really important ways that are not being sufficiently imitated by Windows and Linux: user-friendly backup; removal of the mental model where "file on disk" is somehow different than "file in editor"; unlimited file versioning; a sweet app store; mandatory code-signing.

dirkgently 13y ago
> Apple has yet to sue anyone other than blatant and uninspired copyists, so I just don't care about the issues you feel so strongly about. Where do we start? Lets see: Apple v/s New York City over 'GreeNYC' logo : http://www.widespotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/greenyc290.png http://www.widespotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/gree... Apple v/s Victoria School of Business and Technology over this logo : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Victoria_School_of_Business_and_Technology_Inc_Logo.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Victoria_...) Apple v/s Woolworths Limited over this logo - http://www.topnews.in/files/Woolworths.gif http://www.topnews.in/files/Woolworths.gif Apple v/s Amazon for the use of "App" And let's not talk about the abuse of Rounded Corners (TM)(R)(C)
- cjensen 13y ago
  That would appear to be standard "you must defend your trademark or else it is invalid" lawsuits. Those cases have nothing to do with software freedom.
  - dirkgently 13y ago
    Oh yes, those logos were so very close to Apple logo. Common bully behavior is worse then propitiatory software madness.

andrewescott 13y ago

Is there any easy way to do native iOS application development with Objective-C if you don't run OSX?

shitlord 13y ago
Alternatively, "is there any easy way to do Windows Mobile development with C++/CLI if you don't run Windows?" Obviously, you're not going to have a good time writing code native to a particular OS if you aren't working with that OS. At best, your experience will be subpar. imo
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Android

GalacticDomin8r 13y ago

Not all of us drank the GNU koolaid. I for one tend to chose other opensource alternatives where possible. Not that I'm advocating for Apple. I've been perfectly content for years using FreeBSD as my primary server and desktop OS. IMO it works better than Linux too. For example, at $WORK we run SLES 11 w/ your choice of DE. I use KDE4as I do w/ FreeBSD. KDE4 on FreeBSD has been far more stable for me than SLES(though in SLES's partial defense, it's packages are quite far behind). Anyways, I'm glad to see FreeBSD leaving the GNU toolchain and userland behind. PS -- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has it backwards. A FreeBSD userland w/ a linux kernel might actually be interesting to me.

Roboprog 13y ago
Curious: what problems in the GNU userland utilities do the BSD utilities address? (not saying that there aren't any, just that I don't use the BSD stuff any more enough to know -- e.g., it's been about 20 years since I was using "Ultrix" and the like)
- GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
  > what problems in the GNU userland utilities do the BSD utilities address? Simplicy for one since BSD utils are developed in a mostly non-fractured enviroment. I gave one example in a previous post. That isn't the end of the story, but it's a good start. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640751

w1ntermute 13y ago

Yeah, that shit pisses me off so much. I'm fucking surrounded by people using Macs - it is a complete monoculture and it drives me crazy.

pbsdp 13y ago
That's actually how I feel about Linux; it's a social monoculture and nobody seems to care a whit about anyone that isn't an ubernerd that wants to fiddle endlessly with a poorly designed/integrated OS.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  ...except Canonical has done a ton of work over the last decade to make Linux accessible to casual users. That said, your viewpoint is the party line in the webdev crowd. And at this point, I'm not sure why I should give a flying fuck, because there isn't anything that Canonical or the Linux community can do to convince Apple devotees otherwise. I've been using Linux for the past several years without any issues with its design or integration, and I haven't had to "fiddle endlessly". And I'll continue to do so, regardless of what most everyone else thinks and says. Although it is quite hilarious when people express amazement at the fact that I don't own any Apple products.
  - pbsdp 13y ago
    I would be convinced if Canonical: - Dropped the entire Linux desktop software stack. - Wrote a well-integrated top-down designed set of frameworks that provided a consistent API for desktop software, with binary-level ABI compatibility across major releases of the operating system. - Promoted and encouraged the distribution of standalone applications that included all their dependencies, including distribution via an app store. - Dropped the use of package management for anything other than OS components, especially for managing application dependencies. - Leveraged their well-designed set of frameworks to advance the state of the art and simplify the lives of developers, making it easier to ship "great software" for their platform as compared to others. As it is right now, Linux is a cess pool of poorly maintained, unstable, poorly designed, rapidly shifting crap. There's almost no centralized vision, and what centralized vision does exist is almost entirely co-opted and captured by massive ubernerds that don't seem to understand the first thing about producing a viable platform that end-user application developers would want to target. What Canonical has done is put lipstick on a pig; it's not enough to throw money at making the operating system acceptably attractive to just end users.

btilly 13y ago

Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting for a free, open OS, remember? No, I don't remember that. Because I never was. I strongly dislike Microsoft. But I was just as happy on Solaris as Debian. I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. I do understand that "normal" people love Apple, but I just can not understand why coder people, who grew up learning to code in a GNU world (like me) can succumb to go Apple. I learned to code from Perl. Which was never so dogmatic about the whole GNU thing.

mbell 13y ago

I used linux exclusively for ~7 or 8 years on both laptop and desktop, I'm now a Mac user. I could write a long winded post with all the reasoning, but it really comes down to this: There are a number of things open source software does incredibly well, building user experiences is not one of them.

shirro 13y ago

The laptop hardware mostly. I value command line tools above the GUI and ports, then homebrew have been sufficient along with VMs and VPS providers for my needs. OSX is just a window manager for my iTerms and Chrome windows so is entirely replaceable. I would swap back to a Linux environment in a blink if there was a distro/hardware combination that worked as smoothly.

sergiosgc 13y ago
Look at Thinkpads. Build quality is excellent, and better than Apple's. The hardware is well supported in Linux, and the lots of hackers use them, so help is always a Google search away. They are mostly fugly though (industrial design, built like a tank, looks like one)

Mikeb85 13y ago

Because the hardware is attractive, it's well supported and the OS is decent, and it still runs all the open source stuff they like, as well as proprietary stuff they like. I personally run SUSE on a Thinkpad, I prefer Linux to OSX and Windows, and love Thinkpad hardware (the keyboard is the best I've ever used). I can however understand why Apple stuff is attractive. I've also heard that Linux is easier than OSX when it comes to installing languages, tools, etc..., but OSX is easier when it comes to things like Skype, Office, and of course proprietary software. I've found using Linux full time to be painless and enjoyable though.

sergiotapia 13y ago

I'm wasn't _fighting_ for anything - I'm sure there are others. I just bought the best machine for my money. The machine that would allow me to do my job better. I don't care at all about free philosophy and other things of that nature in software.

duaneb 13y ago

> I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. It's by far the OS I'm most productive in, and all the parts I care about (SSH) are open source.

lotsofcows 13y ago

I'm not fighting for a free, open OS. I'm supporting a good balance of usable tools in a capitalist system. OSX is the most usable tool I've been fortunate enough to be able to afford. Given a choice for important data, I'll also go with open source. My OS doesn't fall into that requirement - only the apps that run on it. The "hacker" in "hacker news" has little to do with any traditional meaning of hacker. I'm not sure why it's in there at all really.

lrem 13y ago
Oh, it is exactly the traditional meaning. Just that instead of hacking on some OSS projects, people here tend to hack on their own (hopefully) commercial stuff. But hacking remains.
- lotsofcows 13y ago
  Hacking has a strong connotation with openness. Look at the outcry when Bill Gates complained about people copying his stuff. Hacking is about stretching things beyond their designed limits. Who the "things" belong to is usually irrelevant.
lotsofcows 13y ago
That "also" should have been an "always".
rsynnott 13y ago
> The "hacker" in "hacker news" has little to do with any traditional meaning of hacker. Well, the _traditional_ meaning would largely predate the availability of Linux, anyway...

jawngee 13y ago

I grew up learning to code in the BASIC on Apple ][ world, before GNU existed. I guess, for some of us, the low amount of friction that Apple provides is worth the illusory premium that people attach to it. I never signed up to fight for an open or free OS, I could really care less if one exists or not. I like Linux, but I don't get religious about these things because being religious about these things would affect my bottom line. I use it on the server, but I would never use it on the desktop, mostly because of aesthetics. Linux looks like shit to me. It's like a Toyota to a Mercedes. Toyota might actually have superior mechanics, but the Mercedes drives so nicely. And then there is Objective-C. After 20 years of C++, C#, C, Delphi - I dunno, I can't describe the love I feel for Objective-C.

protomyth 13y ago

It is a BSD and has the nicest UI. Your fight wasn't mine.

Shorel 13y ago

Hackers are not licensing zealots. At least not all of them. Some of us are more awed by technical prowess than by anything else, and OSX has done some amazing stuff. Quartz compositing, the migration from IBM to Intel processors using Rosetta, Time Machine, etc. All of that is great from a technical point of view, and you should at the very least acknowledge it as an inspiration. If you write code, that's it. However, if you mean the iPod/iPad/iPhone locked stuff, yes, by all means fuck Apple.