Too true. MacOS is the one place you can get a UNIX toolchain in a stable environment. If something works on my Mac, it works on my coworker’s Mac. If something works on Ubuntu but you’re using Nix… Uh, YMMV.
I love Linux, but if you’re gonna use it as a desktop OS, you pretty much accept that you now have a part-time job keeping up on Linux news to deal with the fact that each component of your system is in a perpetual state of “deprecated support for The Old Way, and experimental support for The New Way”.
MacOS is trash. An OS’ primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
It’s an OS designed for people writing word docs on their laptop at Starbucks, not for getting real work done.
Hell, try and enable viewing hidden files and folders in all finder and file picker windows. Oh wait, you can’t!
You can use a terminal command to enable them in basic finder windows, but they’ll still always be hidden in application’s file pickers which use Finder, because lord forbid Apple treats their users like adults.
MacOS is trash. An OS’ primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
How is MacOS’s window and external monitor behavior different from everything else?
Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.
Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a12y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).
You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.
Yeah, if you have a mixed dev team then I’m sure the odd ones out are gonna have the most trouble.
My point was more that if you have a team of all Macs or a team of all Linux, I’m much more confident in stuff working on everyone’s machine in the Mac scenario.
Even if you stretch it to “the Mac users get to customize the hell out of their machines, and the Linux users only do the minimum to get a fully functional dev environment”, I think the Macs end up in a more consistent state.
Too true. MacOS is the one place you can get a UNIX toolchain in a stable environment. If something works on my Mac, it works on my coworker’s Mac. If something works on Ubuntu but you’re using Nix… Uh, YMMV.
I love Linux, but if you’re gonna use it as a desktop OS, you pretty much accept that you now have a part-time job keeping up on Linux news to deal with the fact that each component of your system is in a perpetual state of “deprecated support for The Old Way, and experimental support for The New Way”.
Every Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage works on every Linux system I’ve tried.
Can’t say that about my Ubuntu installation
MacOS is trash. An OS’ primary job is managing applications and their windows and MacOS provides the most utterly unintuitive and non functional UX, the instant you plug in an external monitor.
It’s an OS designed for people writing word docs on their laptop at Starbucks, not for getting real work done.
Hell, try and enable viewing hidden files and folders in all finder and file picker windows. Oh wait, you can’t!
You can use a terminal command to enable them in basic finder windows, but they’ll still always be hidden in application’s file pickers which use Finder, because lord forbid Apple treats their users like adults.
How is MacOS’s window and external monitor behavior different from everything else?
Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.
Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a12y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).
You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.
Fun fact: You can toggle the view for hidden files and folders in macOS using
Cmd+Shift+..Sounds very intuitive. (Not actually being serious here… But if there is a more intuitive option as well then it being a shortcut as well is fine)
Our Mac colleague is literally the only one in the dev team having constant troubles, constantly spinning up VMs to get stuff working.
Yeah, if you have a mixed dev team then I’m sure the odd ones out are gonna have the most trouble.
My point was more that if you have a team of all Macs or a team of all Linux, I’m much more confident in stuff working on everyone’s machine in the Mac scenario.
Even if you stretch it to “the Mac users get to customize the hell out of their machines, and the Linux users only do the minimum to get a fully functional dev environment”, I think the Macs end up in a more consistent state.
I love Linux as well, but there’s always something you didn’t know about that breaks, and it’s up to you to figure out what broke and how to fix it.
I’ve had the problem for a while now that the audio is set to the wrong output after screen lock, and I have given up on finding a fix for it.