I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351].
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug
Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively.
My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.
>My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me.
iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.
That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).
>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).
I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?
>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre
Never had that.
>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
I reckon Joe the average user is perfectly fine with that. Way better than my girlfriends "New folder X", where X is like 1-15 because she can't be bothered with sorting them while manually importing. It's way too time consuming.
Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.
We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.
>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").
Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.
>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
* >Incorrect in what parallel universe?
>Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.*
iPhoto IS one. As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages. iLife is just a marketing name. iTunes used to be part of iLife too. Now they're just apps, apps that 99.9% of people that purchase a Mac will find on their computers pre-installed when they open them. That was half my point: that iPhoto today is just about as much a part of a default installation of Mac OS X as any.
>Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
Now that we've gotten the fact that iPhoto will almost certainly be on my machine when I open it, it should be clear to you that it doesn't matter which of these I am. For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience. Drawing an imaginary line around a subset of applications and calling them "OS" or "not OS" does not take away from the fact that a bad iPhoto experience will understandably contribute to a bad Mac experience. As such, both by technical and laymen's understandings of OS, the critique is valid.
Edit: My mistake, iPhoto is included in the server one as well. So it turns out iPhoto comes installed on every single Mac.
> . As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages
However, reinstall MacOS, and you will notice it doesn't install iLife.
Similarly, most Windows computers seem to ship with that 30 day trial of MS Office these days; does that mean that 30 day trials of MS Office are part of Windows?
>For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience.
Sure, it's a non-part-of-the-core-OS, bundled for free, easily replaceable, with 10s of alternatives, peripheral to using a Mac, part of the Mac experience.
To return to our duck-ing topic, what does that have to do with OS X being bad or "not just working"?
If you had to bring up a bundled, non-essential, app to make your point of OS X not working well, then one has to conclude it works mighty fine overall.
And it's even worse than that: you haven't actually even made any point against iPhoto. Just that you don't like it's filesystem abstraction. Which is neither here, not there.
I am not the OP (read the usernames). In fact I don't have a problem with iPhoto at all since I never do photo stuff (don't worry I have issues with just about every other aspect of OS X). I simply wanted to point out that if he had a bad experience with iPhoto then it is fine for him to criticize Mac OS X. Especially considering that dealing with photos is a pretty basic thing for a user to do now adays, and that iPhoto comes with every single mac, and will automatically launch as soon as you plug in a camera.
I believe you are well aware that you are being disingenuous by treating iPhoto as some sort of unrelated third party application that you have no idea why anyone would bring up out of be blue in a discussion about OS X. Who cares if its "non essential", most of the stuff in OS X is completely non-essential (ahem dashboard, photo booth, even mail considering most people use webmail).
> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.
> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
So... doing "find . -type f -name '.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?*
No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent
Automator + Photoshop.
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
> No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
In what way?
> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.
What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.
Pain in the arse because there is no easy eay of determining which was the master. Instead of a hierarchy, you have a hierarchy with a temporal aspect as well poorly mapped to a non temporal hierarchy.
The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.
Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.
I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.
I have had run ins with iPhoto as well, sorry but if I cannot quickly locate my pictures in Finder something is wrong.
Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?
I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.
I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"
It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages.
Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
No matter how awful iPhoto is, it's still better than almost anything you can find on Linux. I know because that was one of my biggest gripes while I was using Ubuntu up to about 5 months ago.
And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.
No. I used a MacBook Pro (2007ish model) for about 2.5 years. It was a miserable machine, where nothing ever "just worked" [1]. If I'd ever needed to use it more seriously than for occasional VPN access for ssh / a web browser, I'd have ditched it within months rather than wait for it to die of natural causes.
[1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI
connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking
from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted.
Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up.
I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.
> It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot.
That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk.
I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier!
When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).
The SSD models do a good job of hiding any underlying file system issues. With my MPB from 2010 it would hit a limit after a week or 2 of running where the file system would grind to a halt just about and struggle to browse a directory and be slow to sleep/awake.
With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad!
With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder.
When I came to Mac back in 2007 I assumed my dislike of Finder was just a matter of what I was used to. Six years of using Mac at home and Windows at work and nope. I do like column view, and you'll get my new Mac Mini out of my cold dead hands, but if I had a choice I'd have Windows Explorer on my Mac in a second. No hesitation.
Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.
Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.
Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!
It's not nearly as fast, by at least an order of magnitude. Also, because there is no centralized location for apps to be stored (e.g. /Applications) it has a harder time succeeding as an app launcher.
Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window. This turns out to be something I do a lot. So I wind up opening another finder window to do this. Inevitably I wind up with finder windows of different shapes and sizes all over the place. It boggles my mind that the Apple UI team can't see how inferior Finder is.
I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.
Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.
Not in one window. If the folders are nested in in different directories you need two windows. There is that feature where if you drag a file over a folder in the sidebar, and hover, it will open the folders you want in series, but it's very awkward. Unless I'm missing something, which is always a possibility!
As far as I can tell Windows and OS X are the same in this respect. I just moved a file from my Documents directory to my home directory on both systems, and the steps were pretty much identical.
hmmm, you can do that if the folders are close to each other in a directory. How do you do if each is nested deep in different paths? On Windows explorer you can drop down the folders to open any folder in the left side window to drag a file from the current folder?
I've switched over to mac as well. However, Finder is my #2 annoyance. #1 being I so fricking love Winamp, and nothing has come close to that on a mac (or linux) for that matter. And sure, winamp did come out with a mac app, but it was useless I found...
It looks the same. It's still Lists. Lists lists lists. I'm tired of playing music in lists. I want something that organizes and helps me discover music the way I think about it. Lists are not a good interface for this and I don't understand how they persist to this day.
play[1] and cog[2] used to be good, but it doesn't look like either of them have been updated in quite a long time...though the bitbucket repo for cog is showing some action, so maybe it will become active again at some point.
Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).
Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.
And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how.
That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.
Type cmd-shift-g in Finder or just type a forward slash in an open or save dialog to bring up a path entry window, much like the old GTK file dialog.
To connect to a SMB system, use cmd-g and type smb://server/share
Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.
The people who are limited by Finder use Terminal... The people who can't use Terminal don't need more than Finder. Apple is great at hitting sweet-spots that way.
At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser.
Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
Agreed, I spend a significantly large amount of time with 5-8 terminal tabs open and I've never been bugged by it. It's just very feature bare compared to iTerm.
How is Terminal.app embarrassing? In most of the ways that a traditional terminal is important, it acts exactly as expected, and still has convenient "new" terminal things like tabs and profiles.
Very true. If you are using an IDE, it already affords a great FS browser (like dired for example). If not, you're probably not a developer in which case the Finder is great!
That's very much like saying, 'If you have a plumber van, it already drives fine. If not, you're probably not a plumber, in which case a rusty bicycle with a broken crankshaft is great!'
The brokenness of the Finder affects users of all stripes. You don't need to be especially technical. It has been reviled for years and years by developers and non-developers alike.
Sorry that came out wrong. I meant that if you're not using an IDE you're probably not a developer, in context of the parent comment to which I was replying. Your PoV does make sense and I agree with it.
I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS.
At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder.
Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises.
This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX.
Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.
>Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003).
"It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work.
And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations.
>I suppose I'm just not the target market.
Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.
Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).
From what I could understand when this bit me, OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8.
I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.
On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.
On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.
On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.
I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'
> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:
- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.
- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding
If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
Does mac have problems? sure. But it CAN do what you're suggesting. Just get the right finder alternative or crack open the terminal. Done. What Miguel is talking about in the "just works" category is more basic, like sound and graphics.
Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision.
On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.
I too have switched from Linux to Mac in the last two years. Every OS has its annoyances, but the problems you describe are minor/few compared to the problems I experienced routinely on Linux.
I would agree with this, except for my Cr-48, which just keeps trucking along with Ubuntu. My daughter chooses it over a 2008 MacBook with twice the CPU, twice the RAM, the chic of the Apple logo, etc, etc. That and my 2003 Dell tower running SuSE as a home server refuses to die.
A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.
I switched full-time to a Mac a year ago. Multiple-monitor support is pretty horrible, especially when combined with the newer full-screen app mode. It's almost like no developers at Apple use their laptops plugged into a monitor full time. Granted, there's several 3rd party options available, but I hate paying the $10 - $40 for OS-level features that should just work in 2013. When I have my Macbook hooked up to an external monitor and make an app full-screen, the whole desktop slides off of the second monitor, making a dual monitor setup frustrating.
Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc...
My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere.
Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues.
These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.)
Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.
That is often the case on all OSes. At least most of them let third-party be first-class, so the replacements are complete. iOS is an obvious failure here.
I'm confused. I use share with Windows computers and use files with international characters in their names all the time. What problems did you encounter?
Perhaps I'm strange. I always seem to be going the opposite way to everyone else.
I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. Power management rocks, battery life is good (8 hours on my 2007 Lenovo T61!), the hardware is damn cheap, the licenses cost me virtually nothing, literally everything I plug into it works, the tooling is pretty damn good, utils I wrote for Windows NT4 literally 14 years ago still just work flawlessly. My Linux machine is just a VirtualBox VM.
Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works. Email is the same everywhere, all the apps just works, plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!), Nokia Drive just works, maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down), talks to exchange without problems, is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese), opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.
Seriously, it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days.
Bear in mind I am coming from a background on hardcore UNIX machines (big Solaris, HP-UX machines), through FreeBSD to Linux to OS-X.
The worst pain I had was with Solaris (on Tadpole SPARCbook) and just about everything Apple, particularly their unreliable hardware (4 Macs returned for repair!), app compatibility problems, piss poor battery life on iPhone 3/4, shit crock of a POSIX environment and shoddy attempt at online services.
> Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works.
I call shenanigans.
> Email is the same everywhere,
...as with all mobile OSes.
> all the apps just works,
In contrast with iOS? I'm not buying it. "Apps just work" is Apple's selling point for their iDevices and that reputation wasn't just bought by their marketing department.
> plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!),
Pix or it didn't happen. What MP3s was your iPhone - with it's iPod internals - unable to play?
> Nokia Drive just works,
iCloud, Dropbox, and SkyDrive are available on iOS. Nokia Drive is better than all of those?
> maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down),
iOS has Apple and Google native maps apps. What specifically is better about Windows maps than either of those?
> talks to exchange without problems,
...just like iOS, which licenses ActiveSync from Microsoft.
> is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese),
Can't argue that.
> opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.
...just like iOS. I'll be honest: I'm having a hard time buying most of those examples as they run contrary to my own (and anecdotally, most others') experiences.
No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well.
Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I've had the device freeze at least 2-3 times a week as well. In the year I've been using Windows Phone, IE mobile has crashed twice and the device hasn't failed once (Lumia 710).
Won't play mp3s - this is rife. The ID3 parser on iOS devices is a piece of shit: http://www.google.com/#q=iphone+wont+play+mp3s This has been known for literally YEARS and plagues all apple devices from iPod, to touch to iPhone to Mac.
Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is? It's not a Skydrive/DropBox clone. It's a fully blown 100% FREE offline turn by turn satellite navigation and mapping platform akin to your average satnav. It's pretty amazing and is a deal breaker for iOS:
Regarding Apple and Google native maps, see above again.
iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.
> No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well.
Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.
> Won't play mp3s - this is rife.
All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.
> iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.
"My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."
You know, I'm not even really that much of an iOS fan. I've been eyeing my coworker's Galaxy with increasing envy. As a Linux developer, it's looking more attractive to me by the day. It's just that some of your claims ring hollow and a bit outrageous, like if I were to criticize a Lumia 920 by saying that it crashes hourly. That just doesn't jibe with anything I've seen online or heard from friends.
> Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.
I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. One is an Exchange MVP as wlel. This is a regular problem with all iOS devices connected to Exchange. We've had a large insurance company who is a client ban all iOS devices as well due to this issue. They've switched to Android.
> All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.
Absolutely nothing like any of them. I've spent about £200 on iOS navigation apps and nothing comes close. Only a real piece of dedicated hardware is anything like it for accuracy and reliability.
> "My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."
This is not a mail server issue. By elimination, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, Blackberries, Outlook on desktop all work fine. The only odd one out is iOS.
This is surprisingly common. Most people just don't talk about it as they don't give a shit or don't get annoyed by app crashes etc. They assume that's the status quo, then shout at their ops team who sort it out.
1) People who don't use the Microsoft technology stack.
2) People who use Microsoft's proprietary technology stack, and then get annoyed at products that fail to interoperate with it seamlessly, despite the fact that it's undocumented, proprietary, and notoriously difficult to interoperate with successfully.
There are very few people who use MS stack and don't get annoyed at interoperability concerns, because those people realize that the fault lies with Microsoft, and stop using Microsoft's stack.
iOS latest version fixed a problem with Exchange, so I would not be surprised.
Nokia Drive is not like the apps you listed. It's free, high quality, world wide navigation. On my iPhone I use Apple Maps right now. It has potential but besides the already discussed issues my number one annoyance is that it's absolutely not offline! I got bit by this twice, the app is completely useless without a sufficiently fast connection.
> I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works.
You and I have had vastly different experiences.
I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day.
The default command shell sucks rocks, so I'm using (or attempting to use) cygwin, specifically zsh. I have no access to tmux, and while screen works it is not my preferred multiplexer. Even under zsh, though, the typical Ruby commands (ruby/irb/gem/etc.) have to be run with their .bat equivalents, which is a needless pain. The latest issue is with something related to OpenSSL, and I'm still digging through that one.
These are all issues that have been specific to Windows. I ran this exact same code with zero problems on my home OS X box not 4 hours ago. git pull/bundle/rails server, good to go. On Windows this has taken the better part of a day to get going.
You sound like an astroturfer, honestly. "I'm honest, I use other systems. It's just that they all are just awful compared to Windows. Here are generic reasons why, with few specifics."
> shit crock of a POSIX environment
What does this even mean? OS X is POSIX certified. Windows is not. Are you saying POSIX is crap, or that OS X's implementation of it is? Either way I would challenge you to back up that statement up. OS X is the best Unix I have personally had experience using.
I think you are trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver by expecting it to be the same. Embrace the platform's strengths, not try turning it into UNIX and whinge when it doesn't work.
OSX POSIX Certified? That means typically "buggy as fuck but the API is complete". That's as far as the certification goes. They couldn't even get rename(2) to behave properly for about 8 years. Google it. So many little bugs like that shot me for ages. That and the fact the whole damn CPU architecture changed one day.
Not to be confused with Unix, Unix-like, or Linux.
POSIX (pron.: /ˈpɒzɪks/ poz-iks), an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...
why do you do this ? Windows is my desktop enviroment where i run my tools, but all my webdev lives on virtual machines that run Ubuntu. So much easier.. even on OSX i do it this way, and it works beautifully and my desktop OS doesnt matter at all.
"it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days."
As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.
OSX, meanwhile, is still Unix under the hood. I'm frankly stunned that someone coming from a straight FreeBSD background wouldn't value that highly. But your experiences with hardware, while I'm sure legitimate, do not mirror my own. I've owned two MacBook Pros (starting with the first Unibody model) for the last 6 years and both have been rock solid daily drivers, and "functional and uneventful," but also very nice to use—not really boring.
To each their own, is the moral of all these stories. If Windows is gaining stability and OSX continues to be high quality, it just gives everyone more options and lowers the barrier-to-entry of computing.
Twenty years ago you had to invest in your desktop and build it yourself, and laptops were rare. Ten years ago only nerds knew how to maintain Windows. Now you carry an always-connected computer in your pocket and a 4.9 pound supercomputer on your back. No part of this is bad.
As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.
Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems.
OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.
Putting the GNU tools on is pretty easy with Homebrew or MacPorts, though. Getting those is first thing I do when I set up a new Mac: grab Xcode, install the command line tools, get Homebrew, brew install coreutils, findutils, and gnu-sed.
I keep hearing that. Fortunately I haven't experienced it. When I used Windows 7 and wanted to open a program, I tapped "Windows" and started typing the app name. That still works in 8.
My only complaint is a "go back" problem, where opening something like a media file from the desktop opens a Metro/Modern app, and closing the app takes you to the Start Screen rather than back to your desktop. Otherwise, I spend my time on the dual screen desktop mode, using my programs, just like I did in 7. Only now with improved dual monitor support.
Yes I know. I've tried Windows 8 and I don't like it, but thanks to the culture of support and choice, I'm not all that bothered as Windows 7 is good and supported for another 7 years (until 2020). Something (Windows Blue?) may come along and change things by then. I'll deal with it when I get there.
I'm on a 2007 built Lenovo T61 which I can actually see lasting until 2020 as well the way it's going.
I recently switched back from Mac to Windows. I was using Windows 7 on my work computer, and I found myself being more productive and enjoying it more than my home Mac.
Windows 7 really is quite good, and I don't much care for the directions Mac OS X is heading.
I just want to add, that once you want packages and such, for a tool chain,
you'll at least discover some problems, as there is a package anarchy out there
compared to GNU/Linux!
But http://macports.org has a solid repository of packages.
When it comes to "private packages" packages I have found outside repos, I do install
them as "account installs", that is ~/opt/bin, ~/opt/man/man1 .. and so on, so it is
easier to upgrade the OS, and less conflicts with the different packet managers.
Having said that, most things do work, and people are friendly and easy to reach.
Most GNU packages just work, shouldn't you find what you are looking for elsewhere.
I think Mac Os X, (or just OS X now adays), is the greatest platform for free software ever!
My reason for starting out with a Mac was Applescript (http://macscripter.net) and inter application communication IPC.
I haven't regretted that a single day.
The problem comes when you start wanting to use things that aren't on Macports, and are only on homebrew (or maybe fink). But homebrew won't work with macports! So either you have to install one package or the other manually, or you have to install both macports and homebrew, which means that not only are you dealing with an unsupported setup, but you're also dealing with using two separate package managers for the same operating system.
Oh, and don't forget that anything installed via the App Store is completely independent of all of the above.
As a Linux user, I find this concept mind-boggling. I don't have time to keep track of a thousand different package managers. I just want one that handles everything.
I'd say the opposite, forget about Homebrew and keep Macports.
The whole thing may not be so easy to use at first, but when you have read the docs for the port system, it all makes much more sense.
I've found that with Homebrew's very simple recipes, you can find one for pretty much anything. I've been satisfied with some binary vendor-provided packages + app store + homebrew for everything else.
I use the same solution as Miguel. Linux under VirtualBox. So in fact every Mac I've ever owned has also been a Linux machine too. In fact, sometimes several Linux machines!
I had nearly the opposite experience. In ~2007, after the birth of my first child I had very little time. So I thought to myself "I don't have time to keep up with maintaining a Linux desktop" and I bought a nice iMac, and moved from Linux to Mac.
The experience I had was that everything that was a royal PITA on nix at the time (web browsing, audio, skype, video, photo management, suspend/resume, printing) "just worked" on the Mac. Hurray!
But the problem I had was that the unixy stuff stuff I needed to do my job (X11 across multiple monitors, emacs, serial console control, local command-line tools, etc) did not just work, and was more a PITA to maintain on MacOSX than the flashy stuff was to maintain on nix. The final straw was when I upgraded to Leopard, and multiple monitor support in X11 was totally hosed.
In the end, I wound up giving the iMac to my in-laws, building another whitebox for 1/2 the price of the iMac, and I have been happy ever after.
Of course one could argue that Debian (and Ubuntu that relies on Debian's repository) has a culture of packaging stuff by themselves and indeed in the case of Mono there are people that do just that. But those packages are always behind the current version and you can't blame the maintainers for that. And lots of software companies, including Google and Mozilla, are providing packages for Debian/Ubuntu for the latest versions by themselves. It's actually the norm with Ubuntu to setup third-party PPAs that provide packages for something missing from the main repository.
So Miguel here complains about fragmentation on the Linux desktop. It's funny, because they ignore the largest distributions around. At least if instead of OpenSuse they supported Red Hat, I would understand.
Also, my experience with OS X has not be so pleasant. Miguel is a damn good developer, but he must be using a really simple toolchain.
When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily.
Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything. Linux can be painful sometimes, but for most problems you can find documented fixes.
Also, he's a little out of date. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me on my Thinkpad for the last couple of months since I got my current laptop. Of course, I preferred a model with Intel HD 4000 instead of a Geforce, so a little research into hardware may be needed to ensure good compatibility, but on the other hand you can't run OS X on anything else other than a couple of Macbook models. Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.
I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily. - Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql... Memcached
I've had no trouble installing Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Memcached on Mac OS X, mostly binary installers are available, or you can just use homebrew for stuff like memcached if not, I use rvm for Ruby as it's easier and ties in with server setups but you can install from source. So be aware that if you have run into problems it is not a universal failing of Mac OS X and was specific to you/your setup. I haven't seen many glitches with the above stack, and answers are usually googlable if you do run into something (for example after installing memcached I googled how to set up the plist homebrew provides to run it on startup). Can't say I've noticed much difference with upgrading/installing packages on linux, but then I tend to manage servers rather than desktops there.
I agree the package manager situation is more sane on Linux though if you're using open source code; it's one of the things Linux gets right (when it works), as opposed to commercial operating systems. That doesn't mean it's impossible or even difficult to use an open-source stack on Mac OS X though, quite the opposite.
When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck.
I'm surprised to hear this, as I've had the opposite experience with a similar toolchain, especially since the advent of Homebrew. What problems are you running into exactly?
Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything.
Again, never had this experience. I would love to hear how you're managing to FUBAR your Mac.
Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.
Have all of these issues been on a Hackintosh? If so, that might explain things ...
> When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily.
As a non-Mac-user (and fellow ThinkPad user!) that occasionally gets roped in to that crazy land, I feel your pain. MacPorts seemed the most useful option before, simply because it seemed a direct port (heh) of the BSD ports system. Honestly the whole thing reminded me of trying to get stuff to work on Solaris 10-15 years ago.... if you can just get your compiler working it works great, just set up /my-usr over here and make sure nothing from the real system ends up in $PATH.
Lately I heard that MacPorts isn't cool any more so I didn't use it for my most recent Mac-oriented client project that needed some installs. I am a stubborn goat, but if I've learned one thing it's that when the trendy open source crowd on Mac wanders off, good luck getting anything to work, especially because Apple loves to change things. So I looked around and it seems Fink is a really nice option. So far everything went great. If you are familiar with Debian it's like that, and it carefully segregates everything into /sw, so just make sure /sw/{bin,sbin} are first in $PATH and you'll be good. I was recently reminded of Gentoo Prefix and wish I'd tried that out.
Now here is the thing that cracks me up. I am of all things a Gentoo partisan. My workstations? Gentoo. Servers for my business? Gentoo. Client systems? Gentoo. LAN server for a moderately technical friend? Gentoo. And I do get some gentle mockery from friends for how much of my CPU time is spent on compiling. Yet here are the Mac acolytes, with the most consistent hardware and OS platform one could ever hope for, and they always have a fetish for compiling things from source. Are they showing off that they know how to do "./configure && make && make install"? Well congratulations, you got my respect for that, now please make binary packages. I mean shit, the only reason I am into Gentoo is I got tired of that rigmarole and managing $CFLAGS manually on my precious Slackware boxen.
You got tired of manually managing CFLAGS, so you moved to... Gentoo? Home of "hope you didn't want to view a GIF in Firefox, because you forgot to build it with that USE flag"?
As if the shell was the problem! It wasn't and isn't.
The fragmentation that matters happens at a lower level, e.g. library versioning, the centralized software repositories, etc. Which is great on the server. But terrible on the desktop.
I don't know what that means. I'm typing this on a Mint desktop and almost every app I could ever want is available through Software Manager or apt-get. I've also released a cross-platform utility that's packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, FreeBSD, and Homebrew without any modifications to the utility itself.
Linux is the one place I've never been concerned with library versioning, poor centralized software repos, etc. Am I missing something?
This is ridiculous. The reason that things "didn't just work" in this case is surely that the OS was fiddled with to the extent that the kernel was recompiled more than once every 3 weeks.
It is hardly valid to compare that to a bog standard release of an OS.
If you are reading this and for some reason have not tried Linux, this experience is not remotely representative.
The laptop I am typing this on (Thinkpad, Ubuntu) - sleep works, audio works, camera works, wifi just works, 3g JUST WORKS, printers just work - better than in Windows, DisplayPort just works, USB devices just work - and I have been running and upgrading the OS for several years.
I have the same setup and the same experience. More importantly, I've had the same setup for many years, so there's no pain, ever. I'm baffled as to why people keep changing OS and setups and repeatedly incurring the cost of change. It's just an OS, it's mostly a solved problem. Spend time fiddling with stuff that can actually make you more productive.
In fact I can't see how distro incompatibilities or fragmentation affects a desktop user when you're using one distro. Icaza use case is far for the average desktop use case I think.
I'm both Ubuntu (Dell) and Fedora (Dell) user, and I don't have/suffer any of the problems described in the post. I'm a developer and I install new packages/tools from time to time, with no problems.
I recently switched over to a MBP from using windows exclusively...ever. For the most part it is awesome, really love it. But not everything "just works" as people like to say.
The one thing that stands out to me the largest is A2DP, idk if this is exclusive to the MBP(late 2011) but it is simply broken. Works 1/2 the time and when it does the quality is horrible.
Another annoyance is theme engine is non existent.
My favorite is the trackpad + osx, such a pleasure to use compared to any other laptop.
With that said i love both windows & osx, each has there advantages.
The non-existent theme engine is, IMHO, one of the greatest features of OSX. I'm quite happy Apple chooses to enforce their minimalist aesthetic on the world.
I actually had to look up the name, but it is a bluetooth profile for passing audio over bluetooth. I personally use it to connect my MBP to my audio system wirelessly. It barely works even when the distance between between the MBP and the receiver is less then 3 feet.
Many open source advocates like Miguel a decade ago have really been motivated by two things: Their love for Open source as a concept; and their love for Unix. This particularly shows in Miguels great essay "Let's make Unix not suck".
And the Mac achieves 2/3 of that. It made Unix not suck. It provides most of the open source goodies on top (using something like brew). And it also provides the kind of proprietary software that simply can't be matched by available open source software (like most of the Adobe tools).
Although I can sense some bitterness in his recent essays, he simply acknowledges the fact that the classic Linux desktop won't make it. (However I think it may actually succeed even on the desktop in the form of something Android related.)
As I see it, there will be a peaceful coexistence of proprietary and free software. Free software succeeds a) where collaboration is needed (Webkit) and b) to provide the kind of pluggable modules that OO programming promised to deliver but never did. Just think of all the stuff on github that you probably pull into your projects all the time.
I remember reading the Reddit AMA with Linus Torvalds where someone asked him what his home computer setup was and Linus said MacBook Air. Running Linux of course, but I thought that was interesting.
Good hardware can make a huge difference in the experience whatever you are running. I sometimes think people don't give enough credit to Apple for the power of sweet homogenous hardware to make a whole OS/software ecosystem that much smoother. Or maybe they give too much credit to apple for the other parts of the stack.
I run a Scientific Linux desktop at work and have a MacBook Pro for personal stuff, with Virtualbox for (mostly) Ubuntu. Granted Ubuntu is pretty easy wherever, but Virtualbox setup for me tends to have fewer kinks. I wonder if it's down to the same environment homogeneity.
Props to Miguel de Icaza for writing this. Talk about being transparent.
I was always a windows developer. In my internship I was forced to use an Macbook pro and simply hate it.
I was doing an TCP stack for blackberry and working with serial/Bluetooth communication for testing was a pain, in the end I just installed Windows on parallels.
I really don't understand this cult of Mac. I really think that is a way to be "cool" and follow and wear the "nice start-up guys" mask.
I bet Miguel is more like me than most of you, that is, living in a unix/linux terminal for the last 15 years or more - AND doing file management in that terminal!
I've also gone to the Mac from unix/linux as my primary machine as it just works. What I mean by that is suspend/resume, wifi, and all that stuff that you shouldn't think about anymore.
Sure, all I use on it is a browser, iTerm, emacs and dev tools installed from MacPorts, but it provides me with a good environment - that just works. Updates have never broken anything for me - not even the OS updates. Can't say the same about Linux.
This is the attitude that puzzles me. I install Debian. I launch X, with no configuration. My WM starts in the optimal resolution. Sound, which has for years been a major pain point, pretty much just works; Pulse and ALSA may suck, but I've used both with great success and no fiddling of drivers
As for upgrade issues... I apt-get upgrade weekly because things are getting fixed. OS X is still shipping the same out-of-date copy of BSD tools they've been using for years.
The interesting part about this part for me is how subtly differences in software and hardware change what we use.
Without noticing, I stopped turning on the screen for my Linux machine during 2012. By the time I moved to a new apartment in October of 2012, I did not even bother plugging the machine back and to this date, I have yet to turn it on.
That represents to me exactly how new technology is adapted and how old ones die off. Fascinating.
Apple knows this has been a issue for users moving from windows. They chose to solve it in a different way though. OS X uses auto-terminate, killing apps which haven't been used in a while. I think the algorithm was too aggressive when lion released but I think they made it a bit saner in mountain lion.
Do you find that you quit apps so frequently that going through a one-level menu is a hardship? Because I don't know a lot of people who use their computers that way.
Yes, so badly that I even wrote a small menu bar ("tray") utility labeled as "[ X ]". When clicked, it quits an app with the currently active window. But well, this is not an ideal replacement...
I'm just very used to quit an app when I'm done working with it, no matter how soon I'll need to re-open it...
Interesting! It has never occurred to me that this would be important. I never quit apps, unless they're misbehaving (which is, admittedly, much more often than I'd like).
I used to be a Mac basher, as my first MBP gave me a lot of trouble (ended with video card recall). Then I got a beefy ThinkPad W520, which gave me even more trouble (random power-offs at least once per week). Now my work laptop is a 16GB RAM 500GB SSD 2.7GHz i7 late 2012 rMBP, I run VMware Fusion with Windows, Ubuntu and CentOS VMs, which feel faster than my w520 running Windows natively! Past lessons have taught me not to use OS X for dev besides for iOS :)
Retina display is so much better for reading papers. There is no way I'd use even a 1080p display given a choice! It has only given me minor issues so far (failed to wake up in some external display combination in rare occasions). Knock on wood :)
I am very disappointed to see this posted where, when, and how it is. Comparing Linux to Mac is like comparing apples to Lamborghinis. I can get an apple, cheaply if not for totally for free, locally, anywhere at any time. Lamborghinis are very expensive, both in up-front cost and maintenance, and truly don't perform relative to the cost. What i hear is someone moaning about how much effort it takes to choose the best kind of apple, Gala? Granny Smith? Sour Green? Golden? Macintosh? I'd rather have an apple than Apple.
This story sums up my own experience quite nicely as well. While I really enjoyed using Ubuntu/Debian for almost 6 years, when time came for a new laptop, I just didnt want to deal with yet another issue with nvidia cards or any other oddity. Paying the Apple premium price was a bargain when compared to hours spend getting little issues here and there worked out.
I've had to use Windows again for a work project, it reminded me exactly why I switched to OSX. People have really different needs from their OS, we should be thoroughly glad we have 3 real contenders these days that you can use.
Although after using Explorer again I think Finder is no where near as bad.
>Once a virus got on your machine, that was pretty much it. And Microsoft wasn't doing much to stop the infestation. For a long time they didn't even see it as their problem. In retrospect, it was the computer equivalent of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
They want to protect users with Secure Boot, and still they get a lot of crap for it.
Remember Palladium? That would've stopped malware in its tracks. It was railed against big time, and later the same people gave rave reviews the iPad/iPhone more even though Apple implemented the Palladium spec pretty much to the letter.
Also, wasn't Miguel supposed to be Microsoft's shill or something for introducing Mono for Linux and pushing C# on Linux and Mac? Now here he is, selling a Mac!
Maybe he was just a technology lover all along!
I am sure the anti-Microsoft folks' heads are exploding with the contradictions!
> They want to protect users with Secure Boot, and still they get a lot of crap for it.
No. That's only to make it difficult/impossible to boot anything that wasn't signed with a Microsoft key. It protects against one kind of rootkit and that's it.
> Apple implemented the Palladium spec pretty much to the letter.
Apple wasn't trying to force the PC industry to implement Palladium (or UEFI Secure Boot). If you buy Apple, you are buying Apple. When I buy Dell, I don't expect to be forced to also buy Microsoft (although I often am).
> Also, wasn't Miguel supposed to be Microsoft's shill or something for introducing Mono for Linux and pushing C# on Linux and Mac?
People change careers.
> Maybe he was just a technology lover all along!
Maybe I just don't agree with his taste for technologies.
He tried to poison Linux using Mono and that turned out to be an utter fiasco.
So he failed in destroying Linux and he's pissed that he failed. As a result he's now trying to cast some more bad light on Linux: this time Linux isn't an OS whose purpose would be to run CLR app but an inferior desktop/laptop app which shouldn't be used because OS X would be superior.
I'm a very long time Linux user (since the Slackware) days and honestly I've got zero love for that person (and, no, I'm not a Gnome user).
(Note that I fully expect Mac OS X and Windows fanbois to vote this down for stating unconvenient facts)
That developer has always been very controversial in the Linux world amongst serious Linux users. He's been trying to poison Linux with mono and that was a huge lot of energy lost (I'm sure some people will still come here and defend mono and saying how great the CLR is and why C#/F# is the future, etc. But sadly for these the world changed quite a bit since then [cough, iOs, cough, Android]).
Now what I find very ironic is that basically he says that in 2005 OS X rocked because it had no virus, while Windows was full of viruses and that this is why he switched to OS X.
And what do we have today? A major OS X vulnerability issue due to Java applets which infected a gigantic number of devs, giving access inside major target companies like FaceBook to bad guys.
Besides that I can't possibly even begin to understand how OS X would be better than Linux for a developer.
On Linux I can install Java in a user account without needing to be root.
On Linux I can install a browser in another user account, which has no access to Java at all.
On Linux I can display that browser from that other user account to my graphical session if I want to.
On Linux I can have several users and two graphical sessions (or more) simultaneously and switch from one to the other if I want to.
On Linux I can set per-user ID firewalling rules using nothing else but iptables (or whatever suits you):
iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW,RELATED -m user --user-ID 1001 -j ACCEPT
Here only one user (the one with the account which only has a web browser installed, no Java, no nothing, just a browser) is allowed to emit trafic to port 80.
etc.
There are just so many benefits from using Linux as a dev. Security, performances, control, mutliple graphical sessions / mixing windows from several user accounts, KVM, etc.
There's simply no way the walled garden that OS X is allows me to trivially do all this.
Once again: we're talking about someone who's always been controversial in the Linux community because of its love/hate relationship with Linux.
Honestly I don't want of a Linux developer who's telling the world that OS X on the desktop is better for dev than Linux.
Thankfully virtually all of the others Linux developers out there are eating their own dog food.
And who are these others Linux developers? The ones who didn't try to poison Linux with MS technologies.
Also, OS X can run multiple sessions, install a browser with no root access and Java is not installed by default.
But I see you are one of those users that drop their misguided wisdom and ignore all the replies, so I won't expect you to reply here either and keep believing your false facts.
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug