This reminds me of an old story about the original development of OS X Aqua in the 90s.
At the time they were doing functioning mockups for the Aqua design in Macromedia Director. It was not easy to actually implement the UI with the available hardware, but the mockups showed that it was possible. "Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that 'Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?'"
> As it so happened, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team had already been working on a ground-up redesign of the operating system after they discovered that their original goal of porting the look-and-feel of Mac OS 8 completely to Mac OS X would be impossible. "We were only going to be able to get about 95% of the way there [putting the Mac OS 8 interface on Mac OS X], which is possibly the worst thing you could do," Mr. Ratzlaff said. The redesign had been scrubbed by higher-ups at Apple but was put back on track by Mr. Jobs.
> With that, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team's list of requirements for the operating system, which had been called overly ambitious and led to laughter from engineers who heard of them only weeks prior, became mandatory. These included 32-bit color with alpha channels and QuickTime integration, all being able to run on a system with just a G3 processor and as a little as 8MB of video memory. Mocking up the operating system's design and functionality with Macromedia's Director, Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that "Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?"
I guess it depends on how fussy you are about these things - I definitely noticed my 16" MBP lag at times. When the system was under a lot of load in particular the Chrome dev tools started to get quite laggy.
However I got an M1 and can say this is no longer an issue. (despite having only 16GB RAM compared to the 32 on my 16" also). When using native apps the M1 laptop runs amazingly well, it is one of the best performing machines I have ever used for day to day use, even compared to my 5950X desktop system. Of course the 5950X will run circles around it with highly parallel workloads but on single thread the M1 is basically just as good.
My early 2015 Macbook Pro can be a little sluggish when I have lots of stuff open on my 4K monitor, but I think it'd be a little harsh to judge a six year old machine for that! This laptop's done very well really, it's definitely going to have an afterlife as a media server or something after it stops getting macOS updates because I'm loathe to get rid of hardware that's still doing a fantastic job.
I guess that it is fast because modern browsers are fast, implement good algorithms to repaint just what need to be repainted, and delegate a lot of work to the GPU. Exactly like the Quartz compositor engine.
Also the real computer has to think about it more. (E.g. initialize whatever services the applications uses, be concerned about the data structures the applications mirror.). The demo just has to look right on initial inspection.
The use of backdrop-filter triggers a fascinating bug in Firefox if you have manually enabled it (about:config, layout.css.backdrop-filter.enabled = true): the menus have a `backdrop-filter: blur(25px)`, and when they’re closed, the menus are hidden with `visibility: hidden` (I can’t see any reason why `display: none` is not used, you should normally prefer it), and this triggers https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600485, where the blurred backdrop still gets rendered, making the areas underneath those menus basically useless as they’re blurred beyond recognition.
Without having opened the page: visibility can be animated using CSS transitions, so you can fade in/out the menus. Display doesn't work that way, so that's probably the reason.
I've read in other comments that you also built this in React... I think people would kill to read a deep dive of the differences you've seen between both frameworks in the context of building this project. I'm a hardcore React user, and Svelte looks great, but what prevents me from adopting it is that I don't have enough info of what its limitations "at the edges" may be in a complex project (whereas I understand React very well in this sense).
Barring a full-on technical blog post - which I think would get you a lot of exposure, but is too much to ask - if you could share some thoughts here I would really appreciate it.
I see you made some submissions that didn't get a lot of traction. HN sucks like that - sometimes you need someone else to give your project visibility. Hope you get some well deserved publicity now.
Looks pretty neat but one thing immediatly noticed:
When clicking in in the menu bar to open a menu (for example on the apple logo) and then moving the mouse down, but diagonally in a way that the cursor cross the next to the right menu item (eg finder):
- in this demo the hover triggers the finder menu to open
- on a real map the diagonal down movement prevents that and keeps the current menu open
Gotta be honest, the last mac I ever used ran OS8 I think, maybe 9, it was one of the classic Mac os's either way.
I know this is just a UI recreation and not the actual OS but as a long time KDE user, like over a decade, I can't help but think meh, why does this UI get so much praise?
I can make my desktop look, act and behave literally any way I want, I can modify every single aspect of every single thing on my desktop to suit my work flows and everything I do on a computer exactly so my computer does exactly what I want, when I want, exactly how I want it to in the exact way I want things to be done.
I haven't changed much over the years, i've copied my configs through every update, even brand new computers and everything always just works how I want it to.
Why do people pay the premium for this UI Apple forces you to use?
As a long time Mac user, in my opinion what has historically distinguished the Mac from other platforms is the high degree of UI/UX consistency across applications. Mac users historically valued software products that conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and tended to shun non-compliant products; this is why Microsoft Word 5.1 was so well-received by classic Mac users while Microsoft Word 6 was rejected by many of these users (https://lowendmac.com/2013/microsoft-word-for-mac-faq/). While consistency among popular Mac apps isn't (and never has been) perfect, there's much more consistency among Mac apps than among Windows apps or among the X11 ecosystem (though, to be fair, consistency improves when sticking to apps designed for a specific desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME).
This is just my opinion, but I've found the classic Mac OS and pre-Yosemite Mac OS X Apple Human Interface Guidelines to be quite well thought of. In fact, while I prefer the technical underpinnings of Mac OS X to those of the classic Mac OS, I prefer the classic Mac OS's interface, which seems more intuitive to me.
Having the ability to theme one's desktop is nice, but I prefer having an ecosystem of well-designed applications that all conform to a common set of well-designed UI/UX guidelines. This is what has kept me on the Mac all these years, and my disappointment with the Linux desktop is that while it's easy for me to theme the desktop, the applications themselves are inconsistent, theming is only skin-deep, and what does not help is the fact that there is no single toolkit, desktop, and/or UI/UX guidelines (though, once again, I can achieve some greater consistency by sticking to Qt/KDE or GTK/GNOME apps). Granted, I admit the holy grail for me is for those well-designed applications to also have customizable UIs.
However, in an age where Electron apps are becoming more common and where M1 Macs can run some iOS apps, there is less cross-application consistency these days on the Mac. I regularly use Zoom and Slack, which clearly stand out when compared to applications that use the native AppKit API's controls.
I started using Macs 5-6 years ago due to the companies I was working at providing Macbooks and maybe my intuition is ruined by Windows, but I still find Mac very unintuitive and frustrating. I also use Windows and Ubuntu personally and I like both of these more design, smoothness and animation wise.
I feel like everything about the macOS is just weird and the animations are also really weird, like minimizing the window animation - what the hell is that? And it's also weird how icons increase nearby when I hover on something, little things like that feel so off about Mac.
As see on this App, when I hover on the icons in the bottom, they jump bigger and it immediately disorientates me. Like why do that? Am I unable to see the icons in any other way that you have to zoom increase them? And that annoying bouncy animation when those apps require attention.
Same here. I'm equally annoyed with the animations. Especially when an app requires attention, it keeps demanding it every few seconds by bouncing on the task bar. It's unnecessary distraction and I don't know of a way to stop it without clicking on the bouncy icon and addressing its need.
Far more frustrating, however, is the inconsistent window management. Mac is very unintuitive (coming from Windows). If I have multiple windows of an app open, I can't switch to the right window with Cmd + Tab. It opens the window in the same desktop. It's annoying as hell! A four finger swipe always takes me to the next desktop and there's no way to swipe between the apps on the same desktop (a three finger swipe in Windows).
And while this might be in equal parts Microsoft's fault, but MS apps like Teams just suck. When I'm on a different desktop than the one containing Teams, it takes me three clicks to open up the damn window. In some apps, Cmd + Right arrow will advance the cursor by a word and in most others, all the way to the end of the sentence.
I have over 200 apps on my Mac, including a bunch of “big ones,” like the Adobe CS Suite, and the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. I have dozens of dev tools and smaller apps.
Most, I only use occasionally. I use Xcode, SourceTree, BBEdit, and Adobe Illustrator (to create graphic assets for apps), the most.
I am probably at expert level on most of the apps on my computer (which isn’t really saying that much, as most are “one-tick ponies”); even though I may only use most of them, once a month, or less.
That’s the value of a consistent UI, to me. I am not always happy with the platform standards, but being able to fire up an application that I haven’t used in months, and get productive in seconds, is quite valuable.
Not only electron, but also apples own iOS ported apps are plain shit in terms of UX.
Look at HomeKit for example, or any of the other ported apps, no keyboard shortcuts, no keyboard navigation, resizing is a bitch, the proxy icons are on their way out.
As a heavy keyboard shortcut user I find it hard to agree. Windows has been better in that regard for a long time and Linux is catching up fast. The rest to me is just unnecessary eye candy, like the hideous animations everywhere on Mac.
What’s better about keyboard shortcuts on Windows? MacOS has a very rich set of keyboard shortcuts, the prevailing culture is for third-party apps to have them too, and you can map custom shortcuts to any command accessible in a menu.
I haven’t used Windows extensively since 2015, but at least back then I had to have a suite of AutoHotKey scripts just to get close to native MacOS functionality.
My biggest issue with macOS keyboard shortcuts and gestures (and it’s a much worse issue on iOS) is discoverability. Once you know them, though, they do work almost everywhere.
On MacOS, every menu item has the keyboard shortcut displayed to the right, even the ones you’ve custom assigned.
On iOS this is about to get a lot better too; on iOS/iPadOS 15, if you hold down ⌘, you get a list of keyboard shortcuts currently available, interestingly organized just like the menu bar on MacOS.
The totally secret stuff is all hidden behind ⌥, but actually if you hold that down while looking at menu items, they transform into their secret versions. Still not really discoverable, but there if you know where to look.
Yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about. “Hold down CMD,” how do you discover this? CMD-ALT-SPACE for Spotlight? CMD-CTL-SPACE for Emojis? 2-fingers to right click? ALT-2-finger-click for a context menu? Four/Five finger swipe gesture functions? Two fingers from the right for Notifications?
The situation is even worse on iOS. Remember when it was news that you could long-press SPACE in order to relocate the text cursor?
There’s a million of these little things, and if you’re in the ecosystem for awhile, you forget that you’ve learned them. They are genuinely useful and pleasant shortcuts that feel appropriate once you’ve learned them. But as far as I know, there’s no universal way to learn all these handy shortcuts.
A few are configurable via System Preferences, and so you can discover them that way. Many of them are not.
Particularly frustrating is that gestures change depending on your device, even stock settings! A swipe from the upper right corner of my iPhone 7 is different than a swipe from the upper corner of my iPhone 11 which is different, and while a two-finger swipe from the right on macOS gives me notifications neither iPad nor iOS do that. Why is it that two-finger tap is context menu on macOS but a two-finger tap on iOS generally does nothing, and there’s a whole different gesture of long-press (I don’t even know if ForceTap is still a thing or not).
The consistency WITHIN macOS across apps is what’s great about macOS. It’s a shame it’s so hard to discover, and it’s a shame they keep changing these patterns without bothering to unify them.
> Having the ability to theme one's desktop is nice, but I prefer having an ecosystem of well-designed applications that all conform to a common set of well-designed UI/UX guidelines.
How is "well-designed" defined in that case ? e.g. the oft-referenced paper that Apple apparently used to define their environment as primary mouse-driven ("keyboards users state that they take less time and measurably take more time than mouse users to achieve a given task with a keyboard" or something like that, don't remember the actual phrasing) has famously not been reproduced. In contrast the UI work that went into the win95 design seemed much more experimentally reliable.
>I can make my desktop act and behave literally any way I want, I can modify every single aspect of every single thing on my desktop to suit my work flows and everything I do on a computer exactly so my computer does exactly what I want, when I want, exactly how I want it to in the exact way I want things to be done.
I haven't changed much over the years, i've copied my configs through every update, even brand new computers and everything always just works how I want it to.
There's nothing to "deal with". You can skip all of that and have a nice KDE/plasma desktop. On the other hand you have the builtin option to do things that require 3rd party apps on MacOS (caffeine, magnet, etc.)
Being many or a majority doesn't necessarily mean being right though. They are completely unrelated. It's a very weak defense of Apple design choices versus KDE (or anything else).
It’s astonishing to me that one can claim that any Linux-on-PC is beautiful, polished and easy to use. I have bought a Dell XPS for an employee, which is supposed to be the best mass-market laptop before System76s which are way more expensive; and the overall experience is appalling compared to Mac:
- Before even starting, you open the laptop, the bottom stays stuck with the lid, so you raise a little more and shake it and it smashes against the desk. It’s comically unpolished experience. It requires a decade of seniority as an engineer to know that it’s a criteria that you should include to your purchase, whereas with Apple you buy any of them and the quality is uniform.
- I’ve had my macbook for 8 years and still watching movies on batteries, not a single PC laptop can reach such performance.
- It would wake up at the office and play my employee’s music, and I don’t have his password and the sound buttons don’t work without login. Why oh why?
- The GRUB at startup and the workflow for full disk encryption… What is there to defend on the polishing of the various Linux experience?
If you have to be an expert to know that some distribution or another is better, then it’s not an expertise I want to be good at. My job is delivering experiences to my own customers, and software needs to get out of the way.
A very sizable group of people is not making an explicit choice between MacOS defaults or KDE defaults. There's a lot more going on here to make this claim.
I have never understood why people felt the need for all this desktop customization and setup. In a long career in tech I have never seen someone more productive than another because of how they configured their desktop. I am sure people might argue on here that they are infinitely better because of it, but I have never seen it.
An OS is a platform to run apps you need and manage resources of and on the machine. If it does that effectively and reliably without a fight, it does it’s job.
I use a Mac for the simple fact that in the last 13 years…I have had precisely 2 MacBooks and one of them was my daily machine that I used for 10 years. Battery swelled and I retired it. I could have probably replaced the battery and kept using it. My latest machine will likely last me another 3-5 years.
> I have never understood why people felt the need for all this desktop customization and setup.
Compatibility with existing muscle memory.
In 1989, I took a .twmrc file from a friend, which mapped alt-mouse1 to move, alt-mouse2 to resize and alt-mouse3 to iconify. Those mappings became muscle memory over the next 17 years of twm and ctwm and KDE use.
At that point, my whitebox died and I decided to get an iMac because I was very busy with work and personal life, and didn't want to spend a lot of time building/configuring a new whitebox. MacOS was *nix, so how bad could it be? Well, I ended up fighting MacOS tooth and nail, as I could never get my mappings to work reliably. That lead me to use X11 for a lot of things, but that inter-operated poorly with native apps. After about 9 months, I gave up on Mac as a desktop and gave the iMac to my then-inlaws and built a whitebox.
So I feel strongly that the ability to tweak things like this, even if they are never used, can be crucial to some people.
In fact, I'd very much like to covert to using my M1 mbp as a desktop with a dock, but I simply cannot function using Mac's window management on a deskop. I've tried all kinds of tweaks and add-on to get the behavior I want, and they all fail in some way.
I understand the muscle memory argument. Over 30+ year career, I’ve bounced back and forth between Unix, windows, and MacOS a few times and as such lost that subconscious level of system operation you get from that muscle memory for a period of time. Definitely it can be a pain in the ass. I think my difference is that in most cases when I was doing a platform shift, I was doing an app shifts at the same time. So it just became necessary to relearn anyway. I can see if your app platform stays the same and your OS changes, that could create some frustration where tweaking would be more important.
Back in 2008 when I made my last shift the MacOS caused me some frustration because I was expecting window management to work like Windows. Took some time to get past it, but now how it works is my expectation. Lately I have found with moving to iPadOS more and more for non-business computing needs, that when I work on my MBP, I maximize everything and just alt-tab between it all. Windows management needs are almost nil.
I have a _huge_ problem where if I can endlessly tweak something, I will waste hours doing so. I used to do the same with my Android devices, flashing newer nightly rom builds every night for cyanogen. My macOS/iOS devices "just work" and I have very few gripes with their chosen defaults.
Exactly this for me. Why spend hours tweaking something to look and work a certain way when all I am going to use it for is to launch some other program that I will likely run maximized?
Where did I blame the Desktop Environment? Nowhere did I state such, so please stop putting words in my mouth. I find the interoperability of my devices _great_ and I can't get that with Linux. I'd rather spend those hours tweaking servers, or projects, than some pointless (and typically subpar) Linux DE. I don't want to deal with that, as others have pointed out.
It's this thing you keep saying where endless tweaking is necessary. That is not true as I have stated multiple times. If you feel the need to constantly tweak things when you have the option to and can't help yourself that is purely a personal behaviour thing and nothing to do with any technology.
I only said this once, but I know I am not the only one. You asked, and you got an answer, on why people prefer systems where people get what they consider sane defaults. I have an endless curiosity, and if the way I need to deal with it is by making limiting decisions on purpose (while still getting a perfectly capable set of operating systems) then I will. Does my choice to limit what I know I have a weakness in mean I lack self control? I could still go after Linux and the endless dream if I wanted, but I chose not to?
An environment that encourages rabbit-holing is going to be an environment less preferred by people who don't want to rabbit-hole.
You can say that about KDE. You can also say that about "running Linux on a computer with a discrete graphics card".
I do it. (I'm posting this from a Thinkpad with a Quadro, running Fedora, and I have to uninstall a kernel module when I go traveling in order to disable it so I get more than two hours of battery life.) I chose to. Maybe you did too. That doesn't mean you need to Leap To Its Defense every time somebody says it's not for them.
I don't love MacOS, but yeah, I bring an M1 Air with me when I travel on a plane. And my desktop runs Windows with WSL for work stuff.
Truth be told, the p52 doesn't run Linux as much anymore because it's a huge pain. Windows+WSL is good enough, and the primary reason I have a desktop replacement machine for my day job is for video processing.
Options beget choice. Choices need a decision, which requires energy. We can reframe what is called in german Innerer Schweinehund as our innate, hardwired wetware program to conserve energy. Lions and all other cats sleep most of the day, because hunting, which succeeds 1 out of 10 times, requires a lot of energy. We now live in an environment where food is abundant, no running after gazelles till think break down from overheating required. Now it becomes apparent why many people prefer convenience without thinking over choice.
That's nonsense. Having options doesn't mean you have to pick one. Having 1 choice or 10 with a default set is the same unless you start digging into options. This smells like "Apple Knows Best".
That's not true, for many people. If you increase choices then people often feel less happy.
Having more varieties of mayonnaise at the supermarket doesn't necessarily make us happier--it just forces us to expend energy choosing, or worrying that we've made the wrong choice. If there's just one variety then we don't have that issue and we're probably happy with the mayonnaise that we get.
I’m both Mac OS X and Ubuntu user. There was no need to change anything in OSX because there was no need (defaults are good enough) and I use some tweaks on Ubuntu. I understand that this is anecdotal but I guess this is how OSX users feel.
>If you can use a computer to do basic tasks, it's really not hard. If you can't navigate some menus that have confusing titles like, desktop settings and themes and display options and widgets and you can't click and drag things around, whatever OS you use will be a struggle.
I did the Unix porn thing for years, it got old. Not a single bit of that sounds appealing at this point in my life.
I know this one is very subjective (like all matters of taste) but personally I feel like MacOS generally has a higher level of attention to visual detail and consistency than other desktop OS’s. Examples that come to mind are font choice and font rendering (Windows fonts look ugly and weirdly antialiased to me), icon selection (when they change the style, everything is updated to be consistent), consistent spacing and other UI layout between applications, colour choices, animation etc.
Like I say, this is very subjective and Apple don’t get it right all the time, but based on my experience it’s better than the alternatives in this regard. If you value customisability or access to power user features over visual consistency I can totally understand preferring another OS as MacOS does not excel there.
I have previously used basically any open source operating system you can name. From Ubuntu through building Gentoo or building my own LFS all the way to trying NetBSD and QNX on desktop - silly, I know.
I've been a Mac user ever since 2013 and I feel like it's consistency beats any other desktop environment.
I never have to worry about something not working.
I don't have to tell my colleagues at the end of a project that I'm sorry but I'll be off for a couple hour because my custom wi-fi icon just crashed the system. I don't have to wonder whether my laptop will connect to the airport wifi or they're using a different protocol then the one I have at home.
I know I could customise every aspect of the look and feel of my desktop, I just no longer want to.
Comparing an uncustomized OS to a customized one and then stating that it is a waste of time to customize the OS and hence the OS that cannot be customized is better is a bit... odd.
I have no idea what a "custom WiFi icon" is but I'm guessing you bought something with prebundled apps. That is irrelevant to the discussion of consistency in one OS versus another (but of course important in the buying process but that's another matter).
>or they're using a different protocol then the one I have at home.
You are making a pretty bad case for Mac as Apple is the one that creates and enforced all kinds of "standards" instead of using what everyone else agreed upon years ago. Apple doesn't implement the full WiFi standards, they use their own standards for everything from chargers to media streaming protocols to connectors.
There's a lot of good to be said of Mac but it using the same protocols as everyone else is not one. Unless you ban everything else and live in an Apple world but then standards are completely irrelevant anyway.
Ive installed Linux on dozens of machines, wifi works out the box on about 8/10. Bluetooth (after driver download) on about 1/3 without doing more troubleshooting.
On Mac? Both work 100% of the time on every one I've purchased.
That's the difference. 100% vs 80%. If my software deployments broke 20% of the time at work, I would be fired.
And? Wifi works on 100% of the laptops I've installed Linux on out of the box because I select laptops with parts that Linux supports. Just like Apple makes their OS work for their components.
Linux supports far more hardware out of the box than either MacOS or Windows.
> Why do people pay the premium for this UI Apple forces you to use?
People pay the "premium" because they do not have to make any effort in selecting which laptop will work out of the box. Effort takes time, time is money. In general, people would rather pay the money upfront, rather then pay with their time later.
Because I have zero interest in tweaking and messing with it. I want sane defaults, consistent keyboard shortcuts and when I plug something in I want it to just work.
Xfce on Arch then? Shit, my Gentoo/Xfce gives me that too. Apple is all hype.
In the last 12 months there's been loud threads on HN about Apple and MS breakage and user hostility. Meanwhile, my old installs keep working, out of my way. I've been through a few big Xfce updates too - it got better, objectively better and didn't break anything - and never once (since 2007) has it disrespected me with any user hostile $BigCo_MiddleManager bullshit.
In short: cheers to Linux, Gentoo, Arch and Xfce.
So stable my 70+ "boomer" family can use it. My pop thinks it's "as easy as Win95"
I gave up trying to have a linux desktop because of HiDPI issues with mixed monitors, and applications that were inconsistent when running on HiDPI screens. It's been a solved problem on macOS for so long, I had assumed it was table stakes everywhere else.
This is before listing the ecosystem advantages of macOS and iOS.
People do not use Linux Desktops because it is the ultimate comfort experience (it is not), but because they developed an awareness about how important FREEDOM is.
They use Linux _despite_ some technical problems that exist because they want full control of their OS.
Mostly these people know very well that there are shortcomings, also many of them know other computer systems very well and _still_ they use Linux because they feel it is an important choice.
I feel a little bit ashamed that I have to explain this on a website called "hacker news" because that original "hacker spirit" is what is driving most Linux users.
Your position is pure consumerism - fat cat wants everything _now_ and is not willing to think about consequences. Modern surveillance *ism, destruction of our planetary resources and fascism are all build on that mindset.
> Mostly these people know very well that there are shortcoming
Apart from this thread is about how the person thinks it doesn’t have any shortcomings compared to macOS.
> because that original "hacker spirit"
I love hacking too! I want to spend more time hacking. Hence I don’t want to waste my time doing uninteresting things like managing a desktop environment. That’s not interesting hacking it’s janitorial.
> Your position is pure consumerism - fat cat wants everything _now_
You’re just being personally abusive now - not sure why you feel the need to do that. Please cut it out.
My position isn’t for consumerism - it’s using the best tool for the job and appreciating quality engineering. Why would I pick a wonky tool instead? A good hacker picks good tools.
Everything works well. The unix filesystem works well unlike wsl on windows. The trackpad feels like an extension of me rather than something I'm grappling with. You can close the lid and not worry about whether it will wake up when you reopen it. Software/OS upgrade support is great, my old laptop died on me when I upgraded to windows 10, I'm now on a 2013 Macbook Air and it feels as if it were new and it's still running the latest OS. The ecosystem is also important, the cohesion between apple devices definitely removes a pain point, particularly copy and pasting between devices, opening browser windows from your phone on your laptop etc.
I feel all these minor annoyances are worth the premium for me and I'm about to . Don't get me wrong, MacOS isn't perfect but it's a better experience than Windows for me, and Linux is a pain to get setup on a laptop. The biggest one for me is the trackpad on Windows and Linux really suck.
Software wise, I personally pay the premium for the keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere and for the decent terminal.
Having the shortcuts being all over the place and near unusable in Linux is understandable as there's no coordination in this community, but not having a single god damn decent terminal (I tried them all) is pathetic.
If macOS becomes as locked down as iOS, I will switch to Linux and write my own Terminal.
Apple has developed a smooth, consistent, unrivaled UI experience. Everything works the same across apps written in Apple's UI framework. All the keyboard shortcuts are the same, and they use the Command key avoiding the stupidity of overloading Ctrl which is for sending control codes only.
The Mac UI was developed using principles of human psychology which make it objectively easier, smoother, and more pleasant to use. The Linux UI hasn't evolved beyond the concept of "make it look cool". The Apple UI actually works with your brain to make you more productive -- a "bicycle for the mind" as Jobs put it. Granted, this is less true now than it was in the past, but it's still leagues ahead of Windows and especially Linux.
Back im my day we used to skin the shit out of our winamp. Used to show off our latest look whenever you had a friend come over. Good times.
I found a disc with some of my olde skins recently, some of the real premo ones that to translate to todays lingo; were rarer than a rare pepe and spicier than a spicy meme.
> Why do people pay the premium for this UI Apple forces you to use?
Because we like it. Why does that make you so upset?
You could have spent the 10 minutes you spent typing that rant out in being productive with whatever you have instead of raging about my purchases with my money.
I contributed to Linux 0.12 and used it ever since. Yet I mostly access Linux through Terminal on macOS. There are many reasons, and many of them subtle, the consistency and attention to UI detail, etc. I'm constant evaluating it, but I install Linux on _many_ devices, and every little thing that needs tweaking gets multiplied.
Ubuntu for me is getting very good, but inconsistencies like C-M-v in the terminal but C-v in the browser, font handling, etc etc (I could really go on forever) is irritating enough and I don't have time to be an idealist (I did when I was much younger).
The fundamental issue is "which Linux?". Apple sets a single standard and evolves actually fairly slowly over decades. There is a myriad of Linux desktop environments/distribution, but none have the man power and duration that Apple provides.
Buy hey, Linux desktop in 2021 is so much better than it was in 2001, so there's hope.
See I had already pegged you as a low level troll before you blatantly exposed yourself as such and already gave you more time than your baits are worth. :)
Hey, could you please stop posting flamewar comments? It's not what this site is for, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. I don't want to ban you again - we unbanned you a while back and it has mostly worked out pretty well, but if you keep posting this sort of thing, we're not going to end up having much choice.
It would be a shame for HN to lose contributions like that, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and be more mindful of the intended spirit of the site, we'd appreciate it.
You should ask yourself whether, after posting the same accusatory rant time after time after time to strangers on the internet, people are going to conclude that you are providing the rational side of the argument.
Do you barge into people’s bedrooms and demand them to justify their choice of linen and wallpaper too? Does it bother you if their desk isn’t aligned with your internal feng shui?
You’re the one coming in rambling about something just because “I don’t like it” and you expect people to donate their time to arguing with you?
I worked in an organization where UI was free to adjust and it did not work for teamwork. Too many variations. Something that worked for one did not work for the rest, it was painfully slow to assist each other on each other's computers. Involved partial constant re-learning of a new environment. It was a hopeless bunch of individualists, not teamwork.
Saying that with admitting Apple's decisions on 'improvements' are many times controversial the least. They, as many vendors of products nowadays, forget the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". What is worse, they tend to 'improve' or 'revolutionalize' (and nowadays 'disrupt', yeah, they distrupt all right!) things working perfectly and desirably!
I also admit that careful customizations is desirable.
Just like standardization, standardization is desirable too! Standardization has lots of merits.
The premium is for easy app compatibility. MS Office runs on macs, Adobe software, etc. And unix tools (in particular programming language ecosystems) also run on macs.
Because I consider my time more valuable than the cost of the ecosystem. I have no interest to tweak anything, I use the computer to earn my paycheck and constant tinkering and tweaking is not part of it. Open source and free software is free only if you do not value your time enough.
That's why I stopped using Macs years ago. I kept fighting the xcode toolchain on basic things. Maybe it has improved? I don't know, but I am not ready to readjust things when 99% of the time, Debian (or Kubuntu) with KDE just works along with well-supported hardware (for laptops: ThinkPads). There are some minor issues I run into, but it is not convincing me to run out and get something else. Also, if I tinker, it's because I want to, not because I need to. I mostly use defaults myself (except maybe adding a couple of useful widgets.)
I thought at one point I still needed to use Macs (for web development work) but there is nothing special it offers at least for what I mostly do.
> Open source and free software is free only if you do not value your time enough.
I value my time sufficiently, thank you very much.
Some people value their privacy more than a set of default settings, some don't see tweaking and tinkering as cost but as value by itself. Also you don't seem to get what Free Software is - it's not about getting free stuff.
> Open source and free software is free only if you do not value your time enough.
Linux works perfectly if you select the right hardware for it (which is most hardware, just got to avoid a few obscure components).
If you're a developer or use any development tools at all, Linux is easily the best platform and will save you time. If you host anything on the internet, odds are it's a Linux host.
And even if you're just a regular user, if you don't need a specific piece of obscure software, Linux is super low maintenance as long as you didn't select that small amount of hardware that doesn't work.
No one has claimed you would have to pay for open/free software. But, as with everything else, you need to calculate the total cost of ownership. And there your personal effort or your efficiency comes into play.
Yes but having choices doesn't take time, only using them does. Picking one OS over the other because of many options is basically saying "I can't have choices because I can't stop myself from using them". What takes time is having an OS you have to fight because it refuses to do what you need it to do because of some decision taken by Apple. When that happens MacOS gets extremely expensive in time.
