from Hacker News

Bye-Bye, Apple

by rauhl on 10/9/20, 2:49 AM with 70 comments

• by danpalmer on 10/9/20, 10:21 AM

  If you don't like macOS or Macs, that's ok, but this seems like very poor reasoning...

  > Xcode

  You either need it and can't switch to a non-Mac, or you don't need it. What's the argument here?

  > the omnipresent ‘Dock’ (never used it once)

  I hide mine. In 12 years on a Mac this hasn't been an issue for me since I turned Dock hiding on 5 minutes in.

  > the omnipresent ‘Finder’

  Finder isn't great, but I wouldn't say that the graphical file managers on Linux are particularly stellar either.

  > black magic in the ‘Terminal.app’

  What "black magic" is this? Also iTerm2 is a wonderful piece of software.

  > Notifications (and its omnipresent menu hamburger icon)

  Users do typically need to be notified about things. Is the problem that you want these somewhere else? Is it that you want to disable notifications? Because you do have full control over which apps can notify.

  > App store

  What's the problem here? Since they moved system updates back out of the AppStore, it's very easy to just ignore it entirely.

  > start-up chord

  If this is making it to your list of things you hate about macOS, you're really scraping the barrel.

  Come on. Let's make better arguments than this. Let's be clear about our requirements, our biases, our specific likes and dislikes. This article has no substance to it, it's essentially clickbait.

  There are many reasons to dislike macOS, there are many legitimate reasons to move to another OS on other hardware.

  We make better decisions when we are more honest like this.

• by LeoPanthera on 10/9/20, 3:17 AM

  These posts always skip over the problem of the GUI. Compared to macOS, I've never found a Linux desktop even remotely as good, and the problem on the BSDs is even worse.

  Then there are the details that everyone seems to miss, like the fact that OpenBSD has no bluetooth support at all.

  For 99% of the world, macOS is still the best option.

• by Toutouxc on 10/9/20, 7:17 AM

  Sounds like the guy wasn't really the Mac target audience in the first place. It just kind of worked for him on the Unix side of things and all the bells and whistles we justify the steep pricing by were merely "things he is now glad to never have to deal with again".

• by LucidLynx on 10/9/20, 5:59 AM

  I stopped to count how many blog posts "bye-bye Apple, welcome OpenBSD or GNU/Linux" I saw the last years... to come back to macOS a few months / years after for different reasons (especially hardware compatibility to be honest).

  The OS is a tool. Choose the one you are familiar with or want to work on, and change it if you are not happy with.

• by josefrichter on 10/9/20, 11:53 AM

  Why such a sour tone in the post? The author obviously has different needs than 99% of the population that doesn't know what `ps uaxww` is (me included) and doesn't want to know (me included). Get a machine that fits your needs and don't badmouth the others.

• by innagadadavida on 10/9/20, 5:54 AM

  > I’m never going to need a dongle, or say the word dongle, ever again now that Apple is out of my life.

  I find connecting devices through a dongle convenient in certain cases. I mostly work in my home office with 3-4 devices connected and when I want to move around a bit, it is easier to disconnect the single dongle - rather than disconnecting each individual cable.

• by test001only on 10/9/20, 10:13 AM

  I recently swithced to Mac as my primary dev machine and I am not a big fan of it. Things like bad window management, shit keyboard(butterfly) and the keyboard shortcuts not working uniformly across all application makes it a subpar experience compared to Windows/WSL/Surface or Lennovo laptop.

• by andykx on 10/9/20, 6:25 AM

  I find the list of things they won’t miss to be strange. I am not opposed to legitimate criticism of Apple’s hardware/software offerings, but I felt like they were kind of reaching to find things they didn’t like.

  .DS_Store files? The startup chord? The dock?

  These are all incredibly minor things. This read more like an attempt to justify a purchase than any kind of actual comparison or analysis.

  As an aside, I may be totally alone here, but I never plug anything into my laptop with the obvious exception of a charger. I don’t need more ports and I don’t see them as a selling point. That said, I can easily imagine different use cases where they’d be useful.

• by fmajid on 10/9/20, 11:16 AM

  After 15 years of the Mac as my primary client OS, I am (very) slowly transitioning to Ubuntu:

  * Quality control has gone completely downhill. Catalina is completely unusable and the last two security updates for Mojave cause constant OS panics

  * Apple’s push to switch developers to subscription pricing is unconscionable

  * So are their antitrust abuses

  * the price-gouging on the Mac Pro has gotten completely out of hand. I’ve owned a PowerMac G5, Nehalem Mac Pro and 2013 Round Mac Pro, but I draw the line at the new one.

  I love OpenBSD, sadly it is not usable as a full-time desktop/laptop for me:

  * No modern WiFi support beyond 802.11n

  * No Docker

  I haven’t bought a Mac since 2015.

• by eddhead on 10/9/20, 9:32 AM

  Guy seriously hasn't tried a Surface Laptop/Book with WSL2, but yeah this is a very satisfying trend

• by blodkorv on 10/9/20, 10:13 AM

  If hes the guy that is content with running openbsd on a thinkpad. Apple for sure is not what he seeks. It maybe was some years ago but the target audience has become too big for people like him to be relevant for apple.

  People give computer and os branding too much importance, this is a non issue.

• by yayr on 10/9/20, 7:14 AM

  .DS_Store files are indeed sometimes a pain. I remember once setting up a Linux USB boot drive. And it didn't start because MacOS corrupted the drive checksum by writing exactly that file. Of course this can be circumvented by immediately removing the drive after setting it up, but also other USB drives get littered with this once you put them in.

• by justRafi on 10/9/20, 8:38 AM

  I've been on a macOS workstation for 6y, but I miss having a real Linux. I code & live in the terminal, and avoid GUIs. The problem for me is the amazing monitor and trackpad on MacBooks. Are there any latest reviews comparing the trackpad on Linux OSes?

• by pstadler on 10/9/20, 6:06 AM

  I‘m confused. Why was this posted here and what’s the news? Are they some sort of celebrity?

• by durnygbur on 10/9/20, 7:43 AM

  Apple has so much cash that they can make it much worse disregarding any feedback really.

• by ageitgey on 10/9/20, 11:20 AM

  Apple complaint posts on here are always so funny because the logic is always so niche and techy and silly. It comes off sounding like a person who loves running their own steam train because it works for them and can't believe that anyone would ever want to use a car or bicycle.

  More power to anyone who's needs are met by OpenBSD on a laptop, but they are as far from a typical user as can exist. And I don't mean just a stereotypical 'business user' who only uses their computer to access email and spreadsheets, I mean any power user who actually creates stuff with their computer, whether it's programs, websites, music, video editing, documents, whatever.

  This person hates Finder. A normal person hates a laptop that might not go into suspend mode when they close the lid to go to a meeting or it might just lock up and lose all their work because some webcam driver that got loaded doesn't fully support suspend. And god forbid if they try to plug the laptop into a random projector to do a presentation.

  This person hates the startup sound. A normal person hates a laptop where the fonts look like crap or all the GUI elements render at way too small a size unless you edit config files and play with DPI settings.

  This person hates the dock. A normal person hates a laptop that requires you to install command line utilities and edit config files to enable reliable power management and get decent battery life.

  This person hates laptops that don't have lots of different kinds of ports to plug in stuff. A normal person loves that they can just buy any external solid state hard drive on Amazon and plug it into the USB-C port with zero configuration and it transfers files super fast. Or they can buy any brand new USB-C webcam or headset and everything just works and they get it with next day delivery and can get on with their actual job and never thing about it again.

  This person hates .DS_Store files. A normal hates a laptop where trying to have a simple video call is probably going to require 6 hours of figuring out which kernel modules are required to support your webcam and audio chipset. And if you use multiple webcams or regularly switch between headsets or whatever, you might as well just give up.

  This person hates the App Store. A normal person hates a laptop that doesn't let them run essential software like Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, Illustrator or whatever modern creation software makes them 50x more efficient at their job.

  But if OpenBSD solves your specific laptop needs, that's awesome and keep on keeping on. The best thing to happen to computing since the mid-90s is that now pretty much any computer can talk to any other computer and most file types can be read across and range of operating systems and software. It really didn't used to be like that. So at least we live in a world where the steam train people can keep on running their steam trains.

• by fmakunbound on 10/9/20, 5:56 AM

  Glad it works for this bro, but not really insightful.

• by coldtea on 10/9/20, 3:49 AM

  Don't let the door hit you on your way out...