This article echoes a lot of the reasons why I ultimately ditched MacOS. Apple no longer respects when the user wants to update, it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point. Thankfully, leaving MacOS has put most of those issues in the rearview. Hopefully someday Apple recognizes that a bloated OS doesn't make anyone happy, I'm kinda surprised that more people don't talk about the 50 gig download that xCode requires. Kinda insane for a glorified text editor.
I have also switched back to Linux after about 8 years in Mac world, and have been really pleasantly surprised. Things still aren’t perfect, but they’re a far cry from where they were in 2010. My wife and I recently got a new Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell XPS, respectively, both with Linux preinstalled. The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).
I miss MacOS keyboard shortcuts a bit, but most of the software I use for work and personal projects (emacs, terminal/tmux, docker) runs an order of magnitude faster. I love having a real package manager again, and I get first class support for most of the developer-centric tooling I really care about (e.g. Nix).
I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs, but seeing two coworkers have to switch away from them because critical dev tooling isn’t functional, reading about the SSD write issues recently, and now this about the insane size of update files helps temper the temptation.
Keyboard shortcuts are a big sticking point for me switching away from macOS. I expected I could wrestle Linux into something that resembles macOS shortcuts but it’s tricky and inconsistent. The clearest example of where macOS excels with shortcuts is in a terminal window: Command+C for copy, Control+C to kill a process. Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux.
I agree with you on software. Real package managers are great.
I hate to say it, because it’s so against what Linux has been for 25 years, but it would be great if there was a $99 distro with a heavily tweaked window manager that looks consistent across most apps, doesn’t have huge top bars, and conforms to macOS keyboard shortcuts. A lightning fast Spotlight analog would be great too. I recognize I can probably get pretty close to this vision with a patchwork of already available software but I want someone to tie a bow on it and maintain it for me.
I'm not going to use this as a platform to evangelize Linux, but I think you should give KDE a look. It looks really pretty out-of-the-box, and offers you a lot of control over the look and feel of your desktop. On top of that, it has a nearly endless list of keyboard shortcuts that can be rebound in the settings app painlessly. It's a far-cry from a lot of the other DEs I've used in the past, and the "batteries-included" mentality makes it a great analog for Mac and Windows users alike.
KDE has a lot going for it but its customizability is so deep as to be daunting. Each time I've tried using it I've ended up burning hours trying to get every detail just right.
I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.
The most recent update---a pretty big one---has improved the daunting experience a lot.
A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved.
The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that.
I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.
My biggest blocker isn’t a specific window manager, in that I can get a reasonable setup together in a relatively decent amount of time—it’s more around the fragmentation, or maybe my perceived fragmentation of the ecosystem as a whole.
I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place.
I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows.
It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.
Mostly I get by well enough by switching alt to ctrl, meta to alt, and ctrl to meta, plus caps lock mapped to ctrl. This gives me mostly an approximation of the Mac keyboard. Still have to remember the shift when copying and pasting in the terminal, but that’s not a huge deal because most of my terminal use is via emacs, where I have vim mode via evil, so copy and paste is done in normal mode with y and p. For me,a little bit of frustration with the keyboard is not so bad compared to the upsides.
I feel the pain. Unfortunately I gave up trying to get Firefox to understand/use super or hyper as command keys. Mostly however I get by fine with caps lock set as control with the exception of VSCode with the Vim plug-in overriding ctrl-c/ctrl-v and breaking copy/paste. Of course VSCode doesn't support super/hyper instead of control key on Linux.
Gnome terminal and all its derivatives support ctrl-c and ctrl-v natively for copy/paste if you just set those as the keybindings in its preferences.
It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste.
if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c
If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c
If there's a running process and selected text, it copies
It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c
---
Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal.
One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.
You can customize the entirety of the to of a terminal. I understand that this might be annoying, but macOS has it's fair share of "screwed up shortcuts" in spots that are not customizable easily (I did, with heavy use of a custom Karabiner config). The main one is word navigation/word selection/word deletion, which are not located all on the same modifiers (cmd), like it is on windows and linux
When I switched from Mac to Linux a few years back, I also had this issue. My solution was radical, I switched to i3 and configured many, many customized shortcuts. Having to "re-learn" nearly everything made it easier because I was forcing a learning curve.
Because often I need to highlight text in the terminal, copy it, then highlight text somewhere else (e.g. in a text input field in a browser, the address bar in the browser, etc.) and paste over it. Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.
In many cases I do just highlight and right-click where I want the text pasted. But that workflow doesn't work a large portion of the time and I need a clipboard that isn't being wiped out almost any time I click on something.
I've been using Pop_OS for the past few months, and haven't had any issues resembling this whatsoever. Of course my clipboard gets overwritten if I don't use a utility that saves previous text selections, but I don't recall this being a feature in any of the Windows/Mac/Linux Operating Systems by default.
> Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.
Oof, is this the normal Linux behavior? That sounds annoying. In MacOS every app (or even tab) has its own separate highlight that it maintains. So in your example, selecting text in the browser would leave the terminal unaffected, and when you bring the terminal back to the foreground your text is still highlighted.
It doesn't surprise me to learn that at all, because I've been confused about having two clipboards in Linux. But I don't remember hearing the term "primary selection" - my interpretation of the behavior was that there are just two separate clipboards. I guess that's not accurate - why not?
X11 supports this with a secondary selection. Unfortunately this functionality isn't exposed in any modern UI toolkits. It does work with Motif apps though.
Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.
I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button.
Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)
ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.
As someone who's mainly been a macOS user in the past couple decades but regularly uses Windows and Linux, I find that the number of papercuts, sharp edges, and lack of consistency in the desktop Linux experience is still too high for my taste. It's certainly much better than it used to be but still has a way to go. But then again, I have little need to tweak system internals.
Fair enough, but if I elaborated much it'd quickly turn into a blogpost.
In attempt to sum things up, I'd say that many of the woes of the modern Linux desktop stem from being stuck between different worlds — one example would be with the X11 vs. Wayland situation. Wayland has slowly been improving over time, but there are still concessions that are being made by using either. I understand that transitions are difficult and that particular case is being made more difficult by parties like Nvidia, but the end result is a degraded end-user experience that won't be fixed until the transition is over.
The easiest fix for this issue is to not use Wayland, like 99% of users. I'm not sure who gave you the idea that Wayland is production ready, but it's certainly not going to see prime-time Linux for another few years.
Ubuntu 21.04 will be using Wayland by default for non-Nvidia users, which would suggest that it's not far off.
There are also configurations that are better supported by Wayland than X11, not to mention Wayland handles things like trackpad gestures better (which at this point, X11 is never going to get better at), so even if it's not yet production ready there are reasons why some might want to use it.
Indeed, I switched to Mac in 2004 because Linux was a horrible UX mess at that point. Mac was a great POSIX system with a consistent UI and major first-party apps.
Now Apple is becoming more and more unworkable to use as a unix system, and Linux is really much better now. Only gap is still first-party software unfortunately but luckily I don't really ever need stuff like photoshop and office personally.
Huh? CrossOver is just a Wine fork with a GUI. It's not an Office suite. You can install the real MS Office on it, but it has no actual office applications built-in.
Others have spoken about how the Linux experience have improved vastly due KDE Plasma et al. I think something which has been part and parcel of the Linux experience always been the latency(From opening apps to performing other tasks), that's what made it usable on even older hardware and I feel it's underrated.
I switched from Kaby Lake-based Core i5 MacBook Pro to Kaby Lake-based Core i5 Linux laptop half the cost due to the Big Sur issues and the productivity has improved several fold.
The apps just opens at the blink of an eye, A phrase often used to describe M1 based Macs is absolutely applicable to my Linux experience after switching from a Mac. Further with KVM, large enough RAM VMs run like any other apps without bogging down the system.
I just tried the latest Ubuntu on an X1 Carbon and was disappointed. At first it was looking good, but then the warts started to show through. I could live with some of the problems, but I had to do some searching to learn that the reason Firefox scrolling was laggy was I was using a non-standard hidpi scale factor, the UI froze multiple times in just a few days, and it felt all around glitchier.
1. Maybe give Kubuntu a try. Have not used Gnome in many years now, but when I did, lag was a given.
2. Have you setup full disk encryption? Unless tweaked (thanks to Cloudflare kernel patches) dm-crypt will cause short system freezes.
3. Firefox is still an unfortunate story on Linux. Still no hardware acceleration enabled by default (and just in the last year, I think, made toggleable universally in about:config)
Thanks for mentioning the Cloudflare patches. While I had already read about that in the past, I wasn't sure what's the current status of their work. So I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised as their patches are included in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.9.
As a pro, at least, dual booting with Linux is still straighforward. I guess other OSes can't compete there.
I have to admit that otherwise its not all roses in Linuxland. Fedora for example, a couple of versions ago switched their upgrade peocedure to the awful download now, reboot system and wait for updates to complete. Basically upgrades feel like Window upgrades now. Maybe that's the way they want to "force" users to swith to Fedora Silverblue :)
Or, you could just install Debian. Then install all the windowing environments you find interesting. No "swap to Kubuntu" required, just start a different window manager. Hell, run all of them simultaneously on the same install using a VNC server.
If you’re interested in the gains on the M1 but dissatisfied with macOS, I encourage supporting the development of native Linux on M1, Asahi Linux. Please contribute however you can. I can’t do the groundwork, so I joined up on Patreon.
> The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).
You're happy now, but wait until you try using the trackpads.
There's only one company in the world that cares enough about ergonomic fit and finish to make a laptop that's actually pleasant to use over long periods of time: Apple. The kinks will be worked out with the M1s and macOS in general, and then Linux will look like the joke it is by comparison again.
Fwiw I don’t mind the trackpad on my XPS or my wife’s ThinkPad at all. Two finger scrolling works just fine, I’ve set up trackpad gestures to go into the overview and switch between workspaces (three finger swipes), and I don’t have any problem moving the cursor around or clicking on things.
I do try to use the mouse as little as possible on whatever system I’m using, but even when I have to, it’s no problem. Just as a point of comparison, I don’t think the trackpads on these machines are anywhere near as much worse (for me) compared to the MacBooks as the keyboards on the MacBooks on the past couple of generations (2018? whenever they added the zero travel keyboards that constantly broke) were compared to literally any other keyboard.
Honestly, a mediocre trackpad is a small price to pay for an ethically sourced system. Considering I do 90% of my work with a mouse, I've never really missed using MacOS. The touch-based metaphors only hurt mouse users anyways.
I’ve got Debian on an X1 carbon and everything is flawless. I wouldn’t doubt that mac’s trackpad is still slightly better by some measure but any difference is in the noise for me.
> it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point
Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.
Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
I have said this before but here I go again: the company I work for is still maintaining a program written in 1999 in Visual Basic 6.0 nearly unchanged on Windows in 32bit.
Windows is the perfect platform for us because it makes our applications so much less expensive to develop. We are a profitable company with hundreds of B2B customers and thousands of users that deploy on their own hardware and we can deliver our software without Docker or anything because the application just runs on any Windows version since XP. It's basically write and forget (apart from a few hickups here and there when Windows Update accidentally breakes something).
We have been working for years to replace parts of the VB6 application with modern .NET libraries and while this is unsupported by Microsoft, it's still working. The VB application hosts the modern .NET libraries and integrates its functionalities and new functionality is exclusively developed in .NET. Our development speed is not impacted by deprecated APIs that we have to urgently address. We can take our time to improve things without our customers noticing.
If we were supporting macOS, we would have shut down a long time ago. It would've been impossible for us to keep up with yearly macOS API changes and to add new features at the same time.
Backward compatibility is heavily underrated. Windows isn’t my favorite experience in some ways but I’m starting to realize just how compelling a long-running consistent execution environment really is after losing enough mac software to time.
My side project is a Windows application I started writing on Windows XP. I had to make a grand total of 0 changes to the app to support Windows 7, Vista, and 10.
It will still run on anything from XP to Windows 10.
I think the comparison is a little non-sequitur. Classic visual basic hasn't had a feature released since 1998 and supported ended in 2005 (with extended in 2008).
It's not a part of Windows itself per se, but a runtime environment. Couldn't you just as well have written an app in Java, which has also kept good backwards compatibility and could still be run on both Windows and MacOS with minimal changes?
Windows maintains backwards compatibility to an amazing level compared to Macs.
If there were a version of Visual Basic for Mac released alongside the Windows version back in 1998, it would have been a classic Mac app which Apple dropped support for after Mac OS 10.4 and never had on Intel-based Macs.
If Microsoft had updated this theoretical Visual Basic for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X back in 2008, Apple would have dropped support for it with Catalina, which ditched 32-bit app support.
What you're hoping for just wouldn't have worked except for a runtime that was still being supported by the publisher to make the jump from Mac Classic to OS X and then again from 32-bit to 64-bit as Apple broke backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft had somehow brought Mac VB out of retirement twice and done both of the above, Apple would be dropping support for it again a few years from now when they drop Rosetta and only support M1-based apps on Mac OS.
Here is a more modern example, after acknowledging that WinRT hasn't been the success they wanted, and starting the Reunion project to merge Win32 and UWP worlds, they are still running them in parallel and it will take several years to fix 8 years of doubling down on WinRT in detriment of Win32, but they will eventually get there even if the ride isn't as smooth as it should be (like killing C++/CX).
VB6 is a good demonstration of the point being made. Even though development stopped two decades ago and support ended a decade ago, they can continue to use it. They probably didn't anticipate development of VB being dropped so soon, but Microsoft had (and continues to have) a history of maintaining backward compatibility.
While dropping support for VB would have had negative consequences and using Java may have been better, we only know that in hindsight. Java was about half the age of VB at that point in time, it's most vocal advocates seemed to be more interested in cutting Microsoft down to size, while it had a mixed reception among both developers and end users. None of those qualities bode well in the long term, especially from the perspective of those invested in Microsoft technologies.
Everything is running in firewalled environments. Literally nothing written in VB6 is publicly accessible. We are using .NET since the release of .NET Framework 2.0 and only very old code is VB6.
Can anything that lives in that firewalled environment reach out to the internet or have stuff reach in? If so, it’s only a matter of time before something gets popped and it’s a bastion to access everything else behind the firewall.
This isn’t even nation state level attacks, it’s pretty standard behavior for botnets and ransomware.
Is the scenario here that they're already compromised with a relay between outside and inside that doesn't need the VB6 app, and then they can compromise the VB6?
Extra malicious hosts are never great but this isn't exactly a dealbreaker.
Unfortunately you have the PR of Apple to deal with too.
I manage hundreds of Macs and the users are constantly howling about not being able to use Big Sur yet. I can explain there are still many dealbreaking bugs (the 11.2 upgrade space problem caused major headaches taking hours to fix in my testing!), it's slower and more screenspace wasteful but they keep wanting it because of Apple's snazzy PR. There's also a major issue with AD accounts getting completely blocked after the upgrade.
Of course what doesn't help is that new Macs come with Big Sur by default and can't really be downgraded. So we have to support it at least for new machines.
- AD accounts get completely broken after the update (can't log in due to an MDM profile intended for local accounts now applies to AD mobile accounts as well). Confirmed by Apple support but still pending a fix
- Apple keeps introducing bugs, I was close to push the button for mass upgrades with 11.2 but then they introduced the space bug which caused macs to be locked in a bootloop that can't be fixed without another Mac present with an older OS version: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/15/macos-big-sur-11-2-1-re... . This really should never have made it through QA.
- Our VPN still has issues with random disconnects that are still being investigated (they switched over to network extensions so this was a big rewrite for them)
- Our antivirus only supports Big Sur as of about 1 month ago. So this was a blocking point for a long time that's only just been resolved. This was also due to the system extension thing mainly (and yes they could have done this sooner as this was already on the cards with Catalina, absolutely)
All in all this is not at a level I call "stable" and that's not all third-party compatibility issues either, some of them are pure Apple.
When I say that it's slower and wastes more screen space, that's a matter of opinion (at least of the impact of these things). But these are not a reason for me to block the upgrade, it's just something I would mention to explain why it's not such a big deal that they can't have it yet :) I will allow it when it actually works reliably.
As the article explains, Apple's PR is not always aligned with reality. Updates are indeed slower and I often hear the fan running hard since Big Sur when it wouldn't before. Especially the WindowServer process uses a lot of CPU now for some reason.
Add to the list, screen sharing became very very spotty and no longer works on a headless Mac without first waking it up and restarting the screen share process. There’s no way they actually qa’d this.
Another fun one, refresh rates will sometimes go back to 60 but the drop down shows the higher rate and only fixes once you toggle. Never had this happen before Big Sur.
Aha I have not even noticed this issue, I will have a look. But we don't use the built-in screen sharing in production. Some of my test boxes have it though, but they're also on an IP KVM luckily.
Don't hold your breath for Box Sync to be fixed--it wasn't working right previous to Big Sur being delivered. Box Drive seems to be the only software that works semi-reliably these days.
Which is why they: do WWDC, provide Xcode for free, put machine learning acceleration into the M1, created a brand new Virtualization framework, demoed Linux on the M1 Macs, develop their own professional software for Macs (Final Cut, Logic)..?
They force you to use it to develop any app for iOS and macOS - it's a significant financial investment to get there ( you need a mac, a developer account), if you had to pay for Xcode as well... ( to be fair, you probably pay for it in a way with the developer account)
>Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.
I have being a Mac user since Apple II. All these changes really saddens me. Can we start some kind group similar to class action law suit to pressure Apple into changing this kind of behaviour in Big Sur. If not enough people upgrade, maybe they will have skip a version and come out with something more light weight. I think that happened with Snow Leopard ( don't remember the exact one).
There is already a group of people applying this pressure. Ex-customers who have stopped buying their products. Join us.
Along with many others it seems, Catalina is the last version of macOS I'll be using.
I have a 2013 27" iMac and as of mid-last year I was considering buying a new one sometime in 2021, but I've now changed my mind, due to decisions Apple has made about how they handle their desktop operating system.
Thanks, is there a group where we can join? Maybe a web site would be great. Please post a link or PM me if you know. It relates to both personal and professional usage of MacOS.
It is so sad and misguided from Apple. I remember when OSX 10.0 came out. A nice Apple UI on BSD core! I immediately rushed to buy an Apple laptop, my first Apple product ever (only Linux/Solaris/otherUNIXs before that).
Been on Apple desktops ever since. But the decline in the last several years has been sharp and no longer tolerable to me. I'm still on a Mac dekstop but I'm on 10.11 and will never upgrade. As OSX becomes closer and closer to an iOS-style user-hostile walled garden, I'm not interested. It'll be back to a Linux (maybe, BSD) desktop after this machine no longer works.
I really hope that something can be done, but Tim Cook's hostility towards the end user gives me a feeling that they're not interested. Don't get me wrong, though, Cook's grip on Apple has offered some much-needed upgrades in a lot of key ares, but the power-user has been ignored the entire time. I also get the feeling that their interest lies in engineering the Mac to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They can sell an iPhone to anyone, they can sell an iPad to anyone, but they can't sell a Mac to just anyone. The solution? Make it run iPhone and iPad apps.
Worth noting that Xcode doesn't just include the IDE, but also an entire LLVM/clang toolchain as well as SDKs and simulator OS disk images for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
It probably wouldn't hurt to split that up a bit — perhaps Xcode could install only the toolchain and macOS SDKs by default with the rest being downloadable on demand, but there's definitely a lot more going on there than just IDE/text editor. It's an all-in-one appleOS development kit.
You just need the Studio that actually works, the "stable" to try stable updates, then the beta and canary versions to try out stuff that take months or even years to arrive to stable and still bork on first stable release.
It's definitely been improving since that initial rewrite. There's still a few rough spots, but they can be avoided almost entirely by writing idiomatic Swift — the stuff that trips SourceKit up tends to be things like nesting closures deeply and ridiculously long optional chains.
SwiftUI has done well to expose SourceKit/Xcode's weak spots. Nearly all of the performance improvements brought to both in the last major release were a result of SwiftUI applying pressure in the previous release.
I was playing with swift a few months ago on my 2016 MacBook Pro and Sourcekit sat on 100% cpu for hundreds of milliseconds whenever I typed a keystroke for some reason. There’s also a bug / horrible design choice in the macos kernel from the last couple of years where if the cpu is pegged, the computer drops keystrokes. These two bugs combined to make my computer lose keystrokes while typing function names - they came out garbled unless I purposefully typed really slowly. I was gobsmacked. It was the worst code editing experience I’ve ever had. Maybe I’m “using the wrong swift features” but it really just feels like its amateur hour at Apple. Did all the senior engineers leave in the last few years? Xcode as a whole has sort of felt like beta software since Xcode 3. Every version they fix one bug, add a headline feature and add 3 new bugs to work around. And everything gets 20% slower. It seems like they keep rushing releases out the door for wwdc then they never fix it properly afterwards.
Swift is a lovely language but the experience is thoroughly and totally ruined by Xcode. Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.
Yikes I’ve seen that bluetooth problem happen but I hadn’t connected it to cpu load. That makes total sense if it’s dropping interrupts. Maybe I should plug in my “magic” keyboard and trackpad.
I remember when Xcode 4 came out. It was slow and buggy we all thought they’d fix it over the next few releases. That just never seems to have happened. It’s a pity - for all of apple’s history of amazing UX, Microsoft’s visual studio (and vs code) are vastly better IDEs for writing software.
there are two other things i notice that seems to happen as well
1. keyboard repeats keys under high load situations
2. mouse cursor lags badly (like seconds) when switching darkmode or an external monitor...
yea, xcode just seems to be stuck in "itunes mode" where every release seems to just tweak thing but never fundamentally improve... i hope this doesnt forebear "apple music" version of xcode (starts sweating)
Apple has been involved in the toolchain since nearly the beginning. They hired one of the original authors and sponsor its development: https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/
Not only have the paid for it, but it wouldn't likely be anything more than an academic project without Apple.
Those only turn off auto updating not update notifications, which you could argue should be an option, but I disagree people are entirely too good at not looking for updates if they don’t have too (out of sight out of mind and all).
If you click on the left side of the notification, it opens System Preferences, which you can just close again or ignore. However, while this avoids setting any attempt to update overnight, it doesn't actually stop you from getting another prompt the next day or whatever.
They intentionally broke ignoring updates. You used to be able to ignore updates through a terminal command so you can keep everything else untouched and still use update notifications or auto-updates for unrelated updates.
Since Catalina, this is intentionally broken, so now you have a constant red badge on the System Preferences icon and regular notifications to update to macOS Big Shit, which in the end causes the user to ignore other updates (like security updates) they would actually want to install.
In a way it's worse than Windows now. Microsoft doesn't lock parts of the filesystem or prevents you from editing files. As an example, I like to change /etc/ssh/sshd_config to permit only pubkey authentication. But even since Catalina it deletes any changes to this file with any system update.
For us developers and tinkerers that like to abuse our systems every which way: I’m inclined to agree with you. For everyone else: I’m not so sure. MacOS (and iOS) has made it super simple for me to help my parents and other lesser tech literate people I know, and really hard for them to screw up (too badly.)
I bet there’s a better middle ground to be found, but I’m not yet convinced that macOS is fundamentally broken beyond repair. I’m on the fence, currently.
I've been a mac user since 2002. I've been getting tired of fighting for access to my own system with each successive OS update. I upgraded to Bug Sur last week, and will be switching permanently to Unix or Linux within a week.
I'm happy with macOS and the UI/UX on Windows and Linux still feels crap in comparison, not to mention the mandatory spyware on Microsoft's side of the fence.
I take the opposite view. macOS UX sucks. A few examples off the top of my head: I regularly find myself frustrated that there is no volume mixer for applications, spotlight search is atrocious and often returns different results for the exact same query, finder is also clunky as hell and won't allow me to do simple things like directly input a directory path string, the search feature also behaves completely counterintuitively by performing a global search rather than limiting the scope of the search to the directory you're in, trying to get macOS to permanently show hidden files is a chore and resets after every update, the touch bar is horrid and regularly causes me to accidentally take actions I did not intend, updates are often very unstable and fraught with world breaking bugs and issues that prevent me from doing my work, xcode is generally a nightmare and a mandatory one... the list goes on and on. Linux and Windows might not look as pretty but they are far more functional with respect to accomplishing my work.
Agreed, here are some more things I’ve noticed weird about macOS:
* When a Macbook is plugged into an external monitor, if you close its lid, it will only stay awake if the power cord is plugged in (otherwise it goes to sleep). There is no notification that tells the user this, you’re just supposed to know it I guess.
* On the Displays page of System Preferences, the only way to get it to re-scan for connected monitors is to hold down Alt, which makes a hidden button appear called “Detect Displays”. Again you’re just supposed to know this.
* The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it. I never see people use full screen in real life, they always maximize everything
* When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work
* When connected to a monitor, there is no way to turn of the laptop's screen, without plugging in and closing the lid. This will overheat your laptop if you are doing anything slightly intensive.
* Sometimes you will lose windows when you disconnect the external monitor.
* Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.
* Macos will randomly choose wallpapers for each new desktop you create, there is no setting for this behavior.
* Due to the unnecessary Cmd button, shortcuts are very difficult to remember. In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.
Honestly, I hate Macos. Windows is 10x better. I don't understand what people like about this system.
> Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.
I get that this goes against your preference but to Apple it's either "your finger moves the content" or "your finger moves the viewport", and that translates to both your finger on the touchpad and on the mousewheel. Remember that Apple sells the Magic Mouse that doesn't even have a mousewheel -- the whole top of the mouse behaves like a touchpad. That's why the settings are linked.
> unnecessary Cmd button
On Apple computers the button has been used for keyboard shortcuts for the last 40 years.
> In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.
That's VS's problem, not ours and certainly not Apple's. Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.
I agree that Windows is 10x better than macOS -- at being Windows. You WILL be dissapointed if you expect macOS to be like Windows with a different skin.
This is not just my preference. This is how mouse scroll wheels have always worked. The settings for scroll wheel and track pad scrolling are shown separately too, in apples own software. You'd never know looking at it that they are linked internally. If it is a single setting, it should be a single setting!
> Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.
Is switching to next tab in safari also a "complicated shortcut"? Because that uses Ctrl too.
> This is how mouse scroll wheels have always worked.
Yes, and touch based devices reminded us that maybe the way mouse scroll wheels had always worked was not the best way after all. Apple's defaults since Lion have been "finger moves content" on all their input methods: iDevice touch screens, touchpads, the Magic Mouse and 3rd party mouse scroll wheels. Again, you may not like it, but it's consistent. I do agree that it could be a single less-confusing setting, but the Mouse and Trackpad screens are unfortunately separate.
> switching to next tab in safari ... uses Ctrl too.
It's switching to next tab in everything, not only Safari. And the choice isn't even that weird, obviously Cmd + Tab is taken and Ctrl pairs nicely with Shift to reverse, so why not? They key is there and AFAIK Ctrl + Tab doesn't override anything important, unlike, well, Ctrl + C.
> It's switching to next tab in everything, not only Safari.
So where's the consistency? I thought all shortcuts were supposed to use Cmd as the modifier and Ctrl was only for complicated shortcuts. But switching tabs in a browser is one of the most common shortcut. So why is it Ctrl?
You can't say because "everything" else uses Ctrl in this context. Because then they should fix the mouse issue also. The crux of my problem is that shortcuts randomly use Ctrl or Cmd, there is no predictability or consistency.
But I do recognise that keyboard shortcuts rely on familiarity and tradition more than consistency and logic, so this isn't a major deal for me.
The bigger issues are the other stuff. External monitor support is as good as broken. Full screen apps are as good as unusable. OS updates regularly break critical features like Settings and Fingerprinter. And on and on. I really never had these sorts of bugs in my entire life using Windows.
> I thought all shortcuts were supposed to use Cmd as the modifier and Ctrl was only for complicated shortcuts. But switching tabs in a browser is one of the most common shortcut. So why is it Ctrl?
macOS apps and 3rd party apps that are not ports from other platforms use Cmd as the primary modifier, i.e. the overwhelming majority of shortcuts are Cmd + something. If your apps use Ctrl a lot, they're probably Linux or Windows ports that don't respect the macOS way. There's plenty of those.
They could've used Cmd + G to go to the next tab and Cmd + H to go back (for example), but in this case it's pretty clear why they went with ctrl + tab, isn' t it? It's convenient, makes sense and it's quite close to the close-window Cmd + W and you can easily add a Shift there to go back.
> Full screen apps are as good as unusable.
I use fullscreen apps all the time (on the laptop screen or smaller monitors) and they're perfectly fine. Some people don't like the paradigm, but that's just personal preference again.
> Some people don't like the paradigm, but that's just personal preference again.
No, I love the paradigm. It's just that random stuff is broken. For example, if you have 2 chrome windows, and at least one of them is full-screen, there is no keyboard shortcut to switch between them. Cmd+` is broken.
Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab both work, but I think the original shortcuts were: Cmd-{ and Cmd-} for switching tabs ( Cmd-[ and Cmd-] are back and forward too ). Both of these still work, and are what I've used for 13 years now.
You can do 1 by setting boot-args to a certain value [1]. But even then it's not the cleanest experience since you have to start in clamshell mode and then open the screen. And if the computer goes to sleep the effect is lost.
> When a Macbook is plugged into an external monitor, if you close its lid, it will only stay awake if the power cord is plugged in (otherwise it goes to sleep).
If it allowed you to run in clamshell on battery power, you'd be able to, for example, switch your monitor to show a different input, forget about the (closed, silent) MacBook and run the battery down to zero with no indication.
> The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it.
That's because "maximize" is a Windows thing and you're not on Windows. The green button feature is called Zoom (I believe) in macOS and it's basically "resize to content". The fullscreen thingy used to be a separate button (Mavericks), which IMO was a bit better.
> When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work.
The shortcut switches between windows that are on the same Space (so that it switches between your different casual-browsing and work-related windows inside their respective spaces if you're the kind of person who keeps different spaces for different situations/projects).
A fullscreen app doesn't cover other apps, like on Windows, but instead goes to its own space. That's why the shortcut can't do anything.
Finder can go directly to paths with Go > Go to Folder… (Command+Shift+G) and search scope can be changed to current directory in Finder preferences. Hidden file visibility can be toggled with Command+Shift+. in both Finder windows and open/save dialogs.
I've used Linux extensively in the past (and OS/2, BeOS and more. Even spent a few years as assistant head developer to a deceased linux distribution), and MacOS X just works. Yes there are usually bugs in new major versions, but _nothing_ comes close in integration, be that between apps on the machine itself, or various devices in the Apple eco system.
Yes, you can do it all with different apps on different platforms, but until you've been "all in" you have no idea what i'm talking about.
Maybe you have an app that will extend your desktop on your tablet, now right click the desktop and select "scan document with iphone" and use your phone to scan a document directly to the desktop.
Need a password on your phone that is only on your computer ? fine, select it on your computer and paste it on your iphone. No special keys involved, it just works(tm)
No other platform offers that amount of integration.
considering that Apple is in the hardware business and relatively uninterested in my personal data, i also have a tendency to trust them with my data far more than i trust anything Microsoft or Google.
I've been a very happy Mac user since 2005, and nothing i've seen in recent years has done anything to change my mind. Whatever "obstacles" people run into, they somehow miss me completely. I still run homebrew or macports on my machine, install just whatever i like, and everything works as well as it ever did.
I think the Windows UX is pretty dogshit overall, but part of the appeal of Linux is how varied each user experience can be. You're expected to tailor a workflow that works for you, rather than adjusting an existing one to fit your needs. For some people, OSX just "clicks", but that's the case for every operating system.
Try taking a look at the "privacy" page under your live.com account.
They know _everything_ you do on your computer. It's of course for "your benefit". They know every application you lauch, how long it was running for, and if it had input parameters, they also know which files you opened.
They know what you search for (if you use IE/Edge), and lots of other "telemetry" data.
Microsoft collects all this information despite having answered "no" to every "do you want to" during setup.
_If_ Apple uses telemetry, it tends to keep it "on device".
Frequently visited locations ? Yup, on device. If you buy a new device, you restart your frequently visited locations.
Anything AI ? Yup, also on device. The only exception i can think of is photos with iCloud enabled. If you store your photos in the cloud, Apple will process them for faces/locations/whatever AI use. That's the reason you can enter "car and dog" into the search field on your iPhone and get all images containing both.
Not easily. I answered "NO" to everything during setup, and it still collects just about everything. And this is Windows 10 Pro.
I'd much prefer an "opt in" scenario where _nothing_ is reported unless i specifically allow it. I'm aware that some things go hand in hand, like "find my device" requires my device to report it's location, but i can't remember EVER opting in to sending every app i open, filename of every file i open, every link i browse, to them.
I would double check if you turned it off. I did and there is no information there. I would much prefer if it was opt in, but that is a trade off im willing to make.
>Thankfully, leaving MacOS has put most of those issues in the rearview.
In what way, except in the: "I can short of build myself exactly the functionality I want from disparate parts and endless customization in some Linux distro, losing other things in the process, and with the end being even more of a hodgepodge (e.g. of UI toolkits and design sensibilities), and equally subject to change with the creators of this or that distro or DE are bored and want to rewrite/redesign everything for no good reason".
When you describe it this way, and I think it is an accurate perspective, it feels like the situation calls for a "new" OS to fill the space the others have abandoned. An OS for people who actually understand something about computers but are not just trying to exploit that knowledge for money.
IMO, the market these OS are targeting generally has no idea what "bloat" even means in the context of computers. The exceptions include people who do understand the concept but are happy to trade bloat for profit.
Nobody wins when the public isn't educated, that much I can agree with. Our goal needs to be shifting to a more equitable digital world, where people aren't "the product" so to speak. That begins by putting the user in control of their own computer, even if it isn't something they're fully capable of understanding or managing themselves. It's always safer for someone to blindly use open source software instead of proprietary software. If the end user truly "doesn't care", then they ultimately won't notice the difference. Eliminating the silly social pressures around computing will hopefully pave the way for a more empowered, creative and effective user.
Well 50gb for a complete SDK and compiler suite and IDE isn't that large. Visual Studio, the comparable IDE for windows starts at around 20GB but can easily exceed 100GB if you include all the features of the product. For Linux, a complete development tool chain for C++, Java, and Python with all the associated libraries will easily exceed 20GB. So Xcode is in the ball park. The difference between Xcode and Linux toolchains is that the latter are broken up into smaller pieces that can be independently updated and Linux has package managers that handle those updates gracefully.
You're partially correct. It's been a while since I've used Visual Studio, but I've heard that a "full" installation will occupy close to 30 gigs, and the default install uses less than 2. Still pretty large, but the 100gb mark might be a bit of a stretch. It's definitely a stretch on the Linux side of things though, my dev toolchains and associated libraries barely occupy 2 gigs, much less 20. Maybe I'm not quite "enterprise ready" though ;)
>it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point.
That is giving too much credit to Microsoft or Windows. Edit: Windows 10X [1] is quite good though.
I also think the discussion completely miss the key point of this update -
> There's a risk of damage to the notebook if you are using a non-compliant powered USB-C hub or a dock.
USB-C. For crying out loud USB-C, Again. Despite all the evidence the vocal Internet and HN still think USB-C as the holy grail. How they should be able to change using a single cable. ( Which is not true ).
I really hope the rumour of MagSafe coming back is true.
