I used macs from the late 80s until last year. Since I don’t game much and my primary work was word processing, I only needed 10 Macs over that time. Five of them had issues out of the box that meant they had to go back to Apple for replacement of major parts or to be replaced alltogether. Some of them were amazing beasts, like the SE, iBook G4, and MacBook Pro 2009. Some were pretty shitty, like the Powerbook 150, Wallstreet, and iMac–all three of which never stopped randomly crashing, even after repeated trips back to Apple.
I built myself a Windows box last winter. It cost lest than $400, plus a couple hundred more for a nice IPS monitor. It works fine. Windows 10 isn’t as nice as MacOS. But the control panels aren’t really confusing. Windows is annoying in some ways. Mac is annoying in some ways. On both you can, with some difficulty, eliminate some aggravations and not others.
The reason I left Mac was that I felt their laptops are starting to be less useful. I want a few ports. I want to be able to upgrade RAM or the storage. And then I bought a cheapass Chromebook so that I could work on a trip. It was adequate. I don’t like it. The keys are like pressing gummy bears, and the screen is like looking through a dirty window at a foggy parking lot. But I realized it would do my “mobile” work. And then I could have a more powerful computer at home that I could improve as I go.
So my “nice” computer is at home, an the portable one is a crappy one I don’t care about much, which I can wipe remotely, just like a Mac. The shittiness is sort of an advantage.
And my PC does everything a I would need a much more expensive Mac to do. Except Finder labels. But then again, the clunky PC File Explorer is way faster than Mac’s finder…
And I have so many USB ports. I think maybe 10. About half are USB 3.0. And I have two USB C ports. Oh man, the ports, the ports…
Android and Raspbian are both great examples that good UIs can be built on a *nix backend.
I’m wondering how much of this is kind of because the news that Apple is switching to the A-series processors in a few years? Buying an x86 MacBook now seems a lot like buying a PowerPC MacBook: soon, it’s going to be abandoned, you won’t be able to get software, and MacOS definitely has an expiration date… The A-series chips are nice, but switching everything over and needing new software and new development tools and all the backend stuff… I’m really not sure if Apple can do it.
But again, I figured the switch to x86 from PowerPC would kill it, and I was concerned about MS’s switch from x86 to PowerPC and then back to x86 on xBox, so…
These statements are equally valid, once one installs StarDock utilities on the given system, and possibly RARutils. What am I going to do in 2045, rename all my old files with reasonable 3-emoji titles and then upload them all to my phone? bsd stuff rocks better than what you mentioned and runs ZFS quietly even on spinny drives.
I really need to try OpenBSD. I’m really not sure why I haven’t.
For context, I’m a software developer who, among other things, has worked on device drivers for Mac, Windows and Linux. These days, I do what the cool kids are calling “Full Stack Development” for a non profit with a high traffic website and lots of backend stuff going on,
I use Mac OS for work, and a dual boot Linux / Windows laptop for personal work / games. Before that I’ve been pretty much solid Linux desktops for personal use since I started on Slackware in the 90s. I did have Solaris for a long time while I was at Sun, but just for work. I started trying Windows again about four years ago (?), but still mostly just use it for games. Windows does seem to have improved alot, but it still seems pretty fragile. That’s a long discussion with alot of detail I’m leaving out, so please understand it’s not a dis, just an observation of some key issues that consistently get in the way of doing serious work for me.
With the Mac OS command line, I switch back and forth without really noticing. The new default shell may mess that up for me, not sure yet.
I tried out Linux for Windows for a bit when it was first released. I’ll check it out again at some point, but haven’t had a pressing need.
Fun anecdote, I once had a dev machine that needed to triple book Xenix, Dos, QNX 2.2x. I later added a quadruple boot with Linux. Maybe quintuple. I know we were also using SCO Unix at that time at that particular shop. Maybe I just used that on the servers in the field. That was some fun mental context switching.
What, no love for the open source hardware builds based on Sparc8 or whatever SiFive design? Can’t say it’s got the mouseclick to gun emulator loop under what the nVidia tools can do, but it’s all down to stuff you’d have wired…or printed, or whatnot. Some neat new tools for formal logic verification (and not so much netlists and power budgets and clock trees) are being made and MIT Open licensed, which Claire keeps mentioning.
Can’t find the page via Hacker News where you can just design your own Silicon and have it made free, so here, have an excuse to fire up a VM and see if it’s as fast as it was supposed to be before all those Spectre mitigations came by. https://www.haiku-os.org/
Maybe they’re not using any modern desktop applications except for a browser? Some people like it that way. Or they do all their Instagram and TikTok videos on their iPhone, and just use the dekstop for writing email and letters, and the occasional novel?
I’m probably doing something wrong by not constantly switching OSes. I’m happily using NetBSD for nearly 30 years, from version 0.9 on my Amiga back in the early 1990s to the current version 9.0 on some generic PC and some VMs, and many different types of hardware in between…
OpenBSD is not for everyone. It is a more elegant weapon, as it were.
Not only do you have to RTFM, the M is generally quite good on OpenBSD. (notable exception: the pf manpage is really hard to follow, even more so if you started with the very first release of pf!)
The overall transparency is so refreshing though after a day of figuring out yet another dumb Linux systemd thing - where the manual is useless and the forums are full of “I poked this unrelated thing with a stick and rebooted” and that becomes the accepted cargo-cult “fix.”
Ok, one more exception: disk partitioning is anything but elegant for all but the most simple cases. Keeps you sharp though for fixing 20-year old Solaris machines and re-installing UNIX® on your 3B2.
Wine only sorta works; There’s a couple apps that I have that that just do not behave nicely (or in a couple cases, run at all). While they are sort of obscure (Scrivener), it boils down to a case of ‘did someone make a config setup for your specific version of app and your very specific version of Wine on your platform’, which is one of the very few reasons why I keep a windows box around in the first place outside of running games.
There’s also show stoppers when other things like java comes into play. (like trying to run an earlier version of the Minecraft client and hitting some obscure error message that requires a good deal of googling to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it.)
It’s rather sad that some editors on BB like to resort to trolling. And price comparisons between similar spec’d Macs and Windows PCs is still a ridiculous exercise in myth hunting-- In the past two purchases of a system for graphics production (running Adobe applications) I’ve priced similarly configured systems from Dell and Apple and it was a wash-- there was no compelling cost savings. Use the tool that best suits your needs and that you enjoy using.
Yeah I like to run fvwm on netbsd and linux but window management features aren’t really the attraction of windows. Most users just want something simple to display their web browser and tricky stuff is an anti-pattern for them.
Yes, I was about to say something about comparing MacOS to Windows NT 4.0 and then I found that is not the point at all.
And TBH I didn’t get that @Ratel’s post was about mixing up BSD and Linux, because non-tech people mix that stuff up all the time, because how would they know these things, so I’d never assume this is intentional. Is this a thing here?
I do it because of the software I can run on it: I get most of what Unix has to offer, and on top of that lots of great GUI apps I don’t get on Unix. Like Sketch, OmniGraffle, Ableton Live, Tinderbox, Scrivener, iThoughtsX, DevonThink. All of those help me either think faster and/or handle greater complexity. The combination of that is so awesome that I put up with Apple’s shit and buy a new laptop every five years or so. And I only upgrade to a new version of MacOS once one of these apps forces me to.
Oh, plus literally none of the gear I have in my Studio comes with an editor or librarian software for Unix.
Also, Mac hardware isn’t that much more expensive in my case, it’s less than €2 per workday, so I don’t really give a fuck. I have used Windows extensively, and also Unix at work for a couple of years, but I’m not looking back to either of those.
