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wraptile
midrus
Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.
hughrr
Exactly the same story here.
It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.
fearface
Same story here, and little anecdote: In a pure mac shop we had a guy apply and he brought his Linux notebook and 5mins into the interview he started hating on hiw bad macos is. Before he had to show some of his work in his linux notebook we had a little coffebreak, after we came back somehow LUKS crashed he wasn’t able to boot the system or restore the disk. We gave him a USB Stick and 3hrs to solve it or admit that he was wrong about bashing macos.
BadOakOx
But is it faster? And does it actually work?
I might be unlucky, but I can't count on my two hands how many times did my 2019 MacBook Pro become unresponsive (and occasionally it restarted itself... After being unresponsive for 10 minutes). It's a work laptop and there is some admin software on it (afaik), so that might influence my experience... But after a year of use, I still sometimes feel the need to defenestrate it...
My favorite bit is that after a restart sometimes it gives me a screen where I can't change the keyboard layout.. and I can't type my password because of the special characters I use. So, I just restart again and hope I get a login screen with the keyboard layout change possible. (And yes I have changed the default layout multiple times, but it always switches back to some other default)
iamwpj
Yes, it's like being mad that your salmon doesn't taste like tuna, even though you clearly chose it at the market.
amelius
> Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work
Huh, they said they really tried to like macOS for an entire year ...
midrus
How is it "trying to like it" when you try to replace everything and re arrange the entire OS to your liking?
I think they just tried to convert it to Linux for 1 year and that didn't work, which as I said, that's expected, it might not be the OS for you and that's fine. We're lucky we have options, and we are all not the same.
As I said in the comments, macos is for people that can accept the trade offs, that can adapt to a more rigid and propietary system in exchange for something that just works and allows you to focus on your actual work, and not on tuning your computer as if it was a hobbies sports car.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I've been like that in the past. Now I just prefer things that just work and I don't have to waste my time maintaining. We are all not the same, thanks God.
Jnr
10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available.
Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support.
During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop.
Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison.
Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.
jcelerier
> Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore.
interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...
Jnr
If I remember correctly, back in 2014 it lacked wifi and audio drivers, and the hidpi support on Linux was the main deal breaker.
I have also installed Linux on my work T2 2019 MBP, and it is looking much better but still rough around the edges and you can't use mainline kernel. At least hidpi on wayland works nicely, though not all of the apps do.
asddubs
is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?
Jnr
Will see how it goes. I remember how AMD open source driver started more than 10 years ago. It was not a pleasant experience on my machine. Even now on AMD APU box that I use for gaming - GPU driver crashes at least once a month.
I hope that people behind Asahi will have better luck. :)
stjohnswarts
If you don't like the animations why not turn them off?
foepys
It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel.
The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps.
I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.
richardfey
You can disable them also from Accessibility
jmnicolas
Thank you for this, my phone feels 2x faster now!
mgradowski
I have found this setting to break some apps (e.g. Spotify, my bank's app) though.
Shared404
Same here. Would be nice to be able to do it on an app-by-app basis, or add exceptions.
nvarsj
Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.
microtonal
Interesting. I switched to an AMD laptop for over half a year (ThinkPad T14 AMD). And I went back to a MacBook and convinced me not to go back to Linux on a laptop for at least half a decade.
Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).
It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.
nvarsj
Fair enough - I think there were a lot of teething issues with the recent amd laptops due to lack of kernel support and some bugs in the s3 bios implementation. I probably would have been similarly frustrated if I bought 9 months ago.
Fortunately the bios bugs are fixed and the latest kernel (5.15.11) supports s3 pretty flawlessly so far, although I was using traditional suspend before that without issue. I haven’t had any other issues and has been stable over the last month of usage. Temps and performance are great and around 9-10 hrs battery life. So I think it's worth buying now.
hughrr
Same story with my AMD based T495. It was horrible. I also have an M1 MacBook Air now.
I lost count the amount of times it’d panic or something would break when I needed it. The same laptop was rock solid running windows and my daughter has it now as her daily driver.
mrintegrity
t14s here (ubuntu), there was a bios update that solved the suspend battery drain issue, same with the dock as there was updates for that too that can be installed with fwupdmgr. Disabled Bios power management to allow the OS to control it and really it's pretty flawless.
I love my thinkpad t14s, it's fast and quiet and all hardware works (even lte, although does admitedly require an alpha driver, it works fine)
lytedev
How is battery life?
beebeepka
My 16 inch Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H is good for about 10 hours of light web development
That said, I am not one to have their high refresh rate screen at anywhere near even mid brightness levels. That includes desktop, TV, phone, etc
heavyset_go
How much does the processor scale down when you hit 68C for a while?
nvarsj
No throttling as far as I can tell. When using 16 virtual cores at 100%, each core tops at about 3Ghz (probably due to power limits). Temps creep up to about 68, fan goes on, and it stays there.
hansel_der
why should it?
Wilem82
I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux:
- Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)
- macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
- I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors
- I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine
- The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
- All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable
- GUI feels slow compared to Windows
sbuk
The whole point of the CTRL key is for control characters when using a terminal. The command key on Macs (and the subsequent key pairs) predates CTRL-Z/X/C/V by around 10 years - Larry Tesler, had conceived the notion while at PARC working on text editing for Alto, decided to use the sequence for the Lisa OS.
Originally, Windows followed the IBM CUA [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access] standard, which it still does to a great extent today - Pressing Alt will still activate the menu for instance. In this standard, the cut command was Shift+Del, Copy was Ctrl+Ins and paste was Shift+Ins; which I believe still work as of Windows 10. Microsoft introduced CTRL-Z/X/C/V in Windows 3.1, released in 1992.
In short, the keyboard shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste have been constant on the Mac since it’s inception 37 years ago. It’s been “standard” in the Windows world for 29 years
masklinn
> - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)
'bit of a duh, that.
> My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
...
FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere.
> - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool.
Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there.
> All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason
That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it:
1. macos was first
2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts
3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient
The windows key is a half-assed aping of it.
> And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
tored
If I remember correctly there are generally fewer shortcut keys on macOS than the alternatives.
Things like controlling and moving windows is not supported without third party app.
Thus macOS is a more mouse centric operating system, but at the same time macOS has by default fewer mouse settings too (eg speed vs acceleration)
kitsunesoba
> - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
There is a reason they’re different, and it’s because those are the shortcuts that macs have used since 1985. It would extremely upsetting to Mac userbase if all of the sudden shortcuts were wincloned.
I also think that most Mac shortcuts make more sense in the modern context; they’re nearly all mnemonic (e.g. Cmd+W to close a window and Cmd+Q to quit) whereas Windows shortcuts are more arbitrary and rooted in limitations of legacy platforms (Alt+F4 doesn’t mean anything to someone new to computers, for instance).
tored
Any more example of arbitrary and limitations of shortcut keys on Windows except close window/application?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you switch tabs with ctrl+tab but close a tab with cmd+w on macOS. How is that not arbitrary and not based on a limitation on a legacy platform?
stjohnswarts
- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable
I've never come across this? Do you use some xwindows app that lays characters right on the borders or something?
molszanski
> 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose
> Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in
There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool.
Settings -> Keyboard -> Text
Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)
kitsunesoba
And these sync over to your iOS devices too, where the shortcuts are even more time saving.
masklinn
There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).
midrus
Great tip! Didn't know this. Thanks!
Findeton
They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.
gammadist
The animations are a real pain. Who decided to make the animation to switch desktops almost one second in length?
unvs
Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me.
He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere
9935c101ab17a66
You used to be able to modify a plist to change the duration of things like switching spaces. It stopped working around 10.14 and I really miss it.
_abox
I did the exact opposite. I was on MacOS since 10.2.
But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (too many apps resemble mobile apps with limited functionality) and too opinionated. Sometimes I just want things differently. Another reason was that many new features are specific to iCloud integration and as I use many OSes (both computer and mobile) I could not take advantage of those anyway. I need cross platform. So a lot of selling points became irrelevant.
I moved to FreeBSD with KDE on top and it felt like a breath of fresh air finally being able to set up my system the way I want it. This is so empowering.
It became my daily driver about a year ago and I haven't looked back though I still use Mac and Windows for work, Windows personally for gaming and Linux for some servers.
Of course I lost some stuff too like Apple's excellent multi DPI and great hardware integration. And many apps that were great like pixelmator. But I gained a lot of configurability and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.
brian-armstrong
Nitpick here - Apple actually removed support for decent font rendering on 1x DPI displays so I don't think it's fair to say they support multiple DPI anymore. Completely agree with getting out of Macos though!
lytedev
Interesting! Why FreeBSD over Linux out of curiosity?
_abox
Good question. I had several reasons.
- I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently).
- The excellent handbook
- Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech.
- Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again.
- Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later.
- Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature.
- The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them
- Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers.
So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.
dschuessler
I am curious about your third point. Why do you consider project choices that are good for "big tech" to be a reason to turn away from Linux?
I would have assumed that many contributions by corporations are in the end a net benefit for both corporations and customers or at least not detrimental to customers.
Do you consider some corporate contributions to Linux to be harmful towards consumers? Or is it more a decision of principle?
Klonoar
>and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.
And... not modern wifi? I take it you must be on a Desktop in this case?
GekkePrutser
Oh yes I use a desktop (intel NUC to be precise). I have no need for WiFi, I didn't even look at getting it going.
I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work).
I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release.
I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.
Klonoar
Heh, no hate intended by my original comment - I'd run FreeBSD if I could get away with it, but I'm too wedded to macOS for work nowadays. Just saw the comment and wifi is the only true big holdup in FreeBSD that I'm aware of nowadays, the rest can be... worked around, for whatever definition you have.
hakcermani
Same here, but Ubunutu .. and the lack of upgradeability of storage.
anticodon
For me Linux is about freedom. Other systems might be better in UI/UX or performance (e.g. give more FPS in games for NVidia cards), but I remember the times when Microsoft dominated the IT world and it looked scary.
All corporations strive to fragment the market using non-compatible technologies and then to monopolize the market by consuming other fragments.
This strategy failed in the 90s with the arrival of Linux. Although many times I felt like the whole world will become Microsoft/Wintel, I think we barely missed.
Now, corporations are trying to do it e.g. via forcing everybody into the cloud and killing open protocols. E.g. I have several email accounts and I can't gather mail from all of my mailboxes in one application. Situation is even worse with Calendars. I have two jobs and also my own personal calendar server and I can't collect all my calendars in one app also. I have to routinely check Google Calendar, because even though I can add it to my Thunderbird Calendar, moved or canceled events changes are not propagating to Thunderbird. And I can't integrate Microsoft Outlook calendar into my Thunderbird at all.
I really don't want to rely on whims of one corporation. Also, regarding MacBooks: I remember when the touchbar had no alternatives and it is really awful. This is what monopoly means: you have to live with bad decisions. You have to pay absurd money for a piece of cloth or a roller for the desktop case.
def-
Since this is for work my choice was between a MacBook or Windows-based laptop. Personally I wouldn't even have considered using anything else than Linux.
softwarebeware
Give https://rectangleapp.com/ a try if you want a window manager that can place your windows around the screen nicely.
ridv
Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.
Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!
wyclif
Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.
rcthompson
MacOS does support tiling. You can tile exactly one window across the entire screen by pressing the green button. If you want to tile more than one window, you can buy additional monitors.
(This is sarcasm.)
kitsunesoba
macOS window management philosophy is to not tightly manage windows, letting them live where they end up, not unlike papers on a desk. For occasions where windows need to be side by side and both fully visible (which at least for my workflow, isn’t all that often), they’re only loosely manually arranged that way.
It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.
aulin
IIRC they recently added support for some half-assed tiling, only for two full screen windows side by side. It's called Split View.
hatmatrix
Spectacle was my jam. Simple and free.
colecut
I thought rectangle was the next evolution of spectacle
kaidon
I still use Spectacle! Maybe I'll abandon it if I ever upgrade to Big Sur -- but it continues to work for me.
wyclif
Is the "Jordan Peterson" who is a Silver Tier supporter of Rectangle that Jordan Peterson?
terinjokes
Assuming you mean the one in the news, no. You can see on GitHub it's just a developer with the same name.
fzil
Usually people just make up names when they are donating. I’ve seen few Steve Jobs and Bezos around patreon.
nickysielicki
No, but in the realm of interesting Jordan Peterson facts, I recently learned that him and Jim Keller are brothers in law.
kitten_mittens_
I've been using https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 with my ultra wide I got for work. I like that it lets me do things in thirds.
camkego
As a Linux to Mac adopter I also use Magnet. No relationship to company.
movedx
So does Rectangle. I'm using it right now on a 49" U/W, with this Firefox window on the right-hand third, VSCode in the center third, and Discord in the top-left 6th, and Dune (2021) playing in IINA in the bottom-left 6th :-)
All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.
k1rcher
This sounds really nice… I’m now quite keen on looking into ultrawides.
k1rcher
Daily drove mac for 5-7 years after a childhood of tinkering with Linux installs (no professional development) and falling in love with an AwesomeWM setup with custom keybinds.
After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.
I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)
It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.
boojing
Another alternative is yobai (+ skhd) https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.
chrisweekly
I've been v happy with Divvy for many years. It's not auto-tiling, but it's perfect for for my purposes. Quick cmd-shift-arrow puts a window in [top 1/2, bottom 1/2, left 1/2, right 1/2] or cmd-shift-enter [for fullscreen] (across 2 monitors)... it's exactly right for me to avoid ever reaching for the mouse to position windows.
inDigiNeous
Can you change workspaces without any animation (delay) with rectangle ? Or is just for tiling windows within a workspace ?
I've been using TotalSpaces 2 (https://blog.binaryage.com/totalfinder-totalspaces-future/) to change workspaces in macOS without the annoying animation which you cannot disable.
Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.
Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?
wlonkly
There is a beta-ish build (https://discuss.binaryage.com/t/can-we-help-test-total-space...) which works on Big Sur and M1, at least, (I haven't upgraded to Monterey yet.)
inDigiNeous
Thanks for sharing. Does not look like it's anywhere near production quality, but maybe it works just for transitioning between workspaces.
Seems there would be demand for such software based on the comments. For me at least TotalSpaces 2 has really changed how I use macOS, hopefully they will get it working on M1 & Monterey.
aaronbrethorst
I use SizeUp for this: https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
panda88888
I use rectangle with a 5k2k 40” ultra wide monitor and it’s awesome. Very flexible and customizable, and I highly recommended it. Did I mention it’s free and open source? :)
mattrighetti
I used to love iTerm2 but the only thing that it was missing was that I couldn't set it up as I wanted with a script when I needed to install a new macOS from scratch (there's probably a feature that allows that and I didn't notice).
I moved to tmux + Alacritty [1] (Rust hype and speeed) which is cross-platform and only needs its config file, a nice and clean yaml, in the right place to restore it as I want. Now when I full wipe my Mac I just need to run the script that pulls the config file from GitHub and tada! Also, the configuration file is almost identical to my Linux one so I can move around similarly and have a consistent look.
I'm also used to replace macOS programs like `sed`,`grep`,`getopt`,`ssh` (macOS OpenBSD one won't work with Yubikey),`coreutils` and `awk` with the GNU version. You can download them with Homebrew and to replace them with the macOS default ones you just need to put them at the beginning of your path like this:
export PATH=/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH
euoia
iTerm2 3.4.14
Preferences > General > Preferences > Load preferences from a custom folder or URL
You can save your preferences and load them as required.
smohare
You entirely miss the point. Folk want to do this from a bootstrap script. iterm makes this difficult.
varenc
iTerm doesn't make a bootstrap script easy, but it's still possible. I do it.
Use this to command to set the location of the iterm config folder:
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 PrefsCustomFolder -string "/path/to/iterm config folder"
9935c101ab17a66
There are a bunch of ways to do this while bootstrapping. Just store your iterm config in a dot files git repo, and then symlink it on a new system. You can even use dot bot to automate symlinks. That’s just one way of doing it, I’m sure there are many other ways.
It’s weird to hear someone proficient enough to be talking about bootstrapping a dev machine complain about solving a very trivial problem.
jftuga
Here is my .tmux.conf. It includes a quick tutorial at the top of the file.
I have set PREFIX to be ctrl-a, which mimics GNU screen.
'Ctrl-a m' toggles "mouse" mode, which allows you to resize windows and set focus with the mouse.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jftuga/universe/master/tmu...
k1rcher
+1 for alacritty.
However now that I don’t daily drive mac as much, I’ve defaulted back to iTerm 2 for when I do happen to be doing something on my mac. The default configuration is quite good out of the box. All I really need to do post-install is get my beloved zsh + ohmyzsh plug-ins and I’m good to go :-)
And also my tmux dot files ;)
raverbashing
Kitty has more features and is easier to use than Alacritty IMHO
manish_gill
As a recent convert from Alacritty to Kitty, I can confirm this. Kitty blew Alacritty out of the water in the first 10 mins of my experience with it.
Like holy crap, it's a very well written and well thought out piece of software. And it's fast. I'm all about the Rust hype, but Kitty reduced latency drastically.
akho
Still slower than xterm. And I have yet to see a feature I need that's not in (famously bloated) xterm, and which Alacritty or Kitty provide.
GekkePrutser
With Mac you can usually just copy your entire ~/Library/Preferences folder to get all your apps back the way they were on a new Mac. It's a collection of pliat files that basically are equivalent to the registry on Windows.
There's even a system wide equivalent at /Library/Preferences
smohare
For a very limited set of apps perhaps.
wlesieutre
You also want ~/Library/Application Support
Of course if you're using a lot of cross platform stuff it tends to ignore those conventions in favor of a bunch of ~/.stuff/ folders
vladdoster
I highly recommend Hammerspoon[1] for any macOS automation tasks you want to do. It is not only extensible but alleviates the need for using multiple tools due to its broad feature set.
The only downside after two years of using Hammerspoon is that the community is small since it isn't as user-friendly as yabai, amethyst, etc. However, you'll probably enjoy its open-ended nature, given your article.
9935c101ab17a66
Hammer spoon is the shit. It’s super rewarding to be able to add really complex functionality (like menu bar applets) with ease.
asdff
What works best for me is to not really fiddle with the setup too much beyond the defaults or to install redundant stuff, like using brew to get a fresher version of ssh or installing iterm2 when terminal does the job, or otherwise spending time on window dressing.
I try and lean into the philosophy of the mac, which is that its a desktop which behaves like a real desk. Right now I have 15 windows from various applications open on this one desktop, and its in a giant pile just as if I had a bunch of papers and files in a messy pile on my desk. This works great because you can press a button or swipe along the trackpad and spread out this pile, exposing everything that's in it along with all your other desktops, as if you are spreading out the stacks of papers on your desk.
IMO this method is how you focus on stuff anyway. Your eyes aren't looking at the 12 different things in your tiling window manager at once, so you might as well just have a few things pulled up on top of your pile of windows that are of focus and take advantage of your screen real estate rather than have a bunch of tiny panes artfully spaced. The mouse makes it easy to do fast and sloppy window adjustments which are good enough.
alkonaut
Same. Even if I don't like the defaults, I try as hard as humanly possible not to start fiddling with them. I learn to live with them, until the defaults become my preference.
Now any clean VM or freshly installed machine or borrowed computer at work is set up to my preference. Do I maximize my productivity or have everything exactly perfect? No. But I'd rather have my nails pulled out than tweaking things. If I have to edit a configuration textfile, the computer goes out the window. My OS isn't an important part of my workday. It should just start my IDE and get out of the way.
Torwald
<cmd-F3> shows Desktop and <Swipe up with three fingers> shows Exposé
nowahe
A few tips/software recommendation in no particular order:
- On iTerm2 you can setup a system wide hotkey to toggle a floating terminal in front of all your windows, whatever you're doing [1]. This works even in full screen apps. It really changed my workflow with iTerm, and is really handy.
- For system stats in the menubar, I really recommend iStat Menu [2]. It's paid (12$ for a license), but the quality of the graphs and interface makes it well worth it imo.
- If you have an external display and want to precisely tweek your resolution, I recommend SWitchResX [3]. It's mostly a GUI that wraps some display CLI tools. With it I adjust the resolution of my 4k external monitor currently, running it at 3200x1800 with HiDPI, and adjust it based on my eye fatigue.
- As a more powerful and versatile replacement to Spotlight (Cmd+Space), Alfred [4]. You can customize it to run anything you want, from converting timestamps to dates, opening apps, search the whole system, run scripts, etc
- If you have too many icons in your menubar and want to hide some (either totally or behind a button click), Bartender [5]
[1]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48796/iterm-as-a-s...
[2]: https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
lenn0x
Hidden Bar is good as well, that's what I am using.
28304283409234
I have been using computers for over 30 years, and each and every one has issues, bugs, finicky bits that suck the life out of you and the minutes out of the hours. DOS, SunOS, *BSD, Linux and Mac. All of em.
Just pick your poison everyone, and let us all get on with our lives.
Edit: ...and Windows 3.11 and up.
Joeri
Your comment reminds me of the 20 year old song “Every OS sucks”.
Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap, Everything since Apple Dos, Just a bunch of crap.
From Microsoft, to Macintosh, to Lih-- lie-- lih-- lie... nux, Every computer crashes, 'cause every OS sucks.
rsanheim
Yup. This is why I use exclusively macs now for work and most non-work things (still PC for gaming, for obvious reasons). Of course I'm on linux systems almost daily when it's required, but thats via SSH or maybe a virtualized env if I really need it. For day to day its just a m1 mac with ridiculous performance and amazing hardware.
All OS'es and computing environments are horrible. Its just that Mac OS is less horrible and more in line with getting shit done as opposed to constant fiddling and fighting with your environment.
To each their own of course, but this is has been my experience after 25+ yrs of computing.
JasonFruit
It sounds like this could be the year of OS X on the desktop!
I jest, but this all sounds like a lot more trouble to get the experience you want than most Linux distros would give you. It's not the primary audience of OS X, sure, but it's nice to see how well-served by Linux a sizable slice of users is.
movedx
> I jest, but this all sounds like a lot more trouble to get the experience you want than most Linux distros would give you
I feel like this is an opportunity to delve into a classic, IRC like "Windows vs Linux vs macOS" debate here, but instead I'll simply state a well known, agreed upon truth in our industry: Linux is an absolute joke on the desktop. Even Torvalds thinks it's a mess.
Build your desktop from scratch if you like. It's your time. It's your life. But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.
kaladin-jasnah
> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.
So how do I record system audio on macOS in Audacity again?
Remind me how slow homebrew is compared to pacman on Arch? Having to click through the Security thing in System Preferences because Apple wants to protect me from apps I already know I trust, spending two hours trying to compile the new untested Tailscale since the App Store is broken and Tailscale used some API only App Store apps could use, trying to get my Logitech Marble Trackball to scroll when I press a button and roll the wheel so I can use my mouse. God forbid I want to use my mouse and not spend three hours trying to fix it when it took two minutes to copy the config off ArchWiki for X11 and two seconds to paste the command in on GNOME.
I could go on. Just like Linux has problems with user experiencs, macOS has some pretty egregious faults as well. As a developer, Linux is much more user-friendly to me and has a way better user experience. I can make my system do whatever I want without dealing with macOS's restrictions and that's what a good user experience is to me.
devn0ll
Completely fully disagree with you. My colleagues, friends and a family member have been using Linux for years now. I myself started using Linux full time for about ten years now.
I'll never go back, Windows and Mac cannot touch the experience with a ten foot pole. And Mac does not even begin to know what window management is.
I know, it's anecdotal. But claiming that Linux is not viable on the desktop is just plain silly.
heavyset_go
I disagree entirely. If a user's use case would be suited well by ChromeOS, then it's been my experience that Ubuntu or something similar with Firefox or Chromium will suit their needs just as well.
Modern desktop Linux is actually a nice user experience, and contrasts with the poor Linux desktop experience before ~2015.
r-w
> If a user's use case would be suited well by ChromeOS
Do you know anyone like this? All such people I know prefer the UX on iPad.
saghm
> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.
"Out of the box" is the key phrase here. GP said that Linux was good at serving a certain "slice" of users, and it sounded like they were arguing that trying to massage MacOS into something those users would like is probably more trouble than it works. The setup described by this blog post isn't really "out of the box" either, so I don't think it's crazy to suggest that to someone inclined to tinker with their setup to make it absolutely perfect would potentially be better served by Linux.
aulin
Every single HN thread vaguely related to Linux desktops there's these guys who never tried it for more than a couple of minutes but still feel the need to come here to spread their bullshit. GNOME these days is on par with MacOS if not better on every aspect.
movedx
Been using it for close to 15 years.
Too much work for very little gain.
zonywhoop
As someone who uses MacOS, Linux, and Windows daily for development, family, general business use, and infra administration - and have for nearly 30 years - this is just not the case. Plasma is much farther along than GNOME but neither are as fluid and put together as MacOS. Now against windows, it’s very close.
suction
Well, "every" can't be true because fonts look way better on MacOS.
philliphaydon
Unsure if this comment is satire or serious…
pxeger1
> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box
I use KDE on Linux, and when I do a fresh install, it takes me about 5 minutes to set the settings how I like, 0 janky workarounds, 0 external software, and 0 reboots. The adware/bloatware in Windows and the ridiculous feature deficiency in macOS give me put UX so low that KDE doesn't need to be that good - although it is.
jrm4
What a ridiculous overgeneralization.
A minimalist-ish Linux distro for a lot of people, especially those who mostly are on the web (hypothetical Grandma etc.) will 100% save you a TON of headaches over Windows, and fare quite well against Mac OS as well.
movedx
When she needs support or assistance, that theory holds about as much water as a fishnet.
xxpor
Try to get video acceleration working with nvidia in FF/Chrome.
perceptronas
Interestingly, yesterday, after having to login and "enroll" into some kind of Micro$oft program to download older visual studio 2017 (which I only needed to compile from source and it was a dependency, not actual use). This rubbed me off so much that I thought I need to take a break from Windows. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It took me less time than ever to setup, hiDPI seems to work fine. No problems with suspend, GPU or sounds, everything works. So far I think UX for new users might be even better than macOS. (constant mac laptop user)
Krustopolis
You sound like someone without multiple monitors of differing DPI, which I found to be suboptimal on Gnome versus macOS.
cable2600
NextStep was available for PCs as well as NextCubes. When do you think Apple might release their Intel MacOS code for PCs? It could give Windows 11 a run for its money.
theanirudh
> A better solution for me was using Karabiner-Elements to only swap the right command and option keys:
macOS has a built in tool called hidutil[1] for simple keyboard remapping. Prefer to use that since Karabiner-Elements has some issues on M1 and macOS Big Sur. I use this[2] tool to generate a simple launchd config.
1 - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450... 2 - https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app
9935c101ab17a66
That tool is awesome! Thank you.
BruceEel
Excellent tip, thank you!
def-
Thanks, added to the article!
gigatexal
I recently went back to Linux after using MacOS for seemingly ever.
I’m on Ubuntu LTS with ZFS and i3 and while I miss the amazing hardware of my 2020 MacBook (non M1) I just love the flexibility of the Linux setup: package management is a first class thing, containers are too; Magnet was nice but it’s no i3. And overall things just work which is really nice.
I do miss airdrop and access to messages and other aspects of the apple ecosystem that I enjoy from lock-in but I’m happy for now and going to keep at it.
qudat
After using macs for the better part of a decade and recently moving to Linux: the Linux desktop ecosystem is vibrant and fun if you like to tinker.
There are things that aren’t as streamlined like power management but I’ve been able to get my framework laptop to pretty much exactly how I like it.
I was nervous about sleep/hibernation but honestly using systemd and a couple of tweaks (enabling sleep-then-hibernate) and everything is super reliable, rarely any issues.
Wayland + Sway is a killer combination and everything is super snappy.
I fell in love with workspaces in Mac with touchpad gestures but on a high refresh rate monitor the animation is so slow and it cannot be tweaked. On sway there is no animation and it is instant.
I think once the steam deck matures we are going to truly see a year of Linux desktop soon.
heavyset_go
Plasma has workspace-like features and check this out for gestures[1].
alsetmusic
I didn’t bother to test this because I don’t use multiple desktops, but maybe this is what you were looking for:
> defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0
https://osxdaily.com/2012/02/14/speed-up-misson-control-anim...
howinteresting
That stopped working several versions ago.
I've spent hours trying to make the Mac interface work well. I've come to the conclusion that it's unfixable.
gigatexal
Can I install sway on the 20.04 LTS and when I choose it at the GDM login have it switch to Wayland? i.e Can I have both xorg+proprietary nvidia drivers running for i3 and stock gnome and then do wayland+sway when chosen?
heavyset_go
> I do miss airdrop and access to messages
Check out KDE Connect[1]. It works outside of KDE, too.
easrng
There are several solutions to access iMessage on non-Apple platforms including https://bluebubbles.app/, https://airmessage.org/, and https://www.beeper.com/. You'll need an Apple device or Hackintosh as a server, but you can pay beeper to set up their software on a jailbroken iPhone and send it to you.
vaporary
I also recently moved back to running Linux (on a Thinkpad) after using macOS for a few years. One of the things I miss terribly from macOS is pinch-zoom in Chrome. Has anyone found a way to easily enable it? Thanks!
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I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also wrote my own compose key tool macos-compose[2] and rofi-like clone choosem[3] (eventually bought into Alfred).
Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.
Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway.
1 - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose
3 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem