Why is macOS so comfy?

Why is macOS so comfy?

How'd you get the file size so small with such a high resolution?

Fuck off, we have this thread every day.

looks like a lossy png
idk, it just is

disgusting, go back to because you're gay

how's the hackintosh working out for you? any bugs you've encountered?

nope, everything works perfectly

owo is this the macOS desktop thread?

her butt is smelly!

delet this

OwO

Sup Forums is finally growing up and realizing the fruits macOS and MacBooks bring forth

I'm happy

what did you use to compress your image?

convert from imagemagick

same person

no

>tfw macOS is the best OS for the thinkpad t420 and x220 unironically

i gave you two yous, feet pls

...

Best OS. Literally.

Fuck WinLEL and Lelnux.

Serious question: can you tweak font rendering settings in MacOS? That ridiculous amount of antialiasing that makes regular fonts look bold and bold fonts look black is quite disgusting.

how could she be the f*ta poster if they use different hardware

nigga plug yo shit in

Yes you can. You can disable font smoothing.

Also it looks good by default and you must be an idiot if you disable it.

Where do technology illiterate mactoddler morons get the false impression that they or their fruity toddler toys are welcome much less belong on a technology board?

test

Is the image quality of this jpg than the OP png?

yeah, none of that ugly ditherign

are you just eyeballing it? how can you tell?

Binary choice of:
>1) fuck up glyph proportions with too much smoothing
>2) don't.
hardly counts as ability to tweak font rendering settings.
So basically, you can't.

How so? macOS isn't able to do pic related (exactly like it looks in the pic that is, proper info for both files and folders to be merged).
Not to mention the way most of the system components are out of date (OpenGL, bash, no vulkan support...).

...

owo

After nearly 10 years of using OS X as my primary OS for personal work, I switched away in late 2014. I consider it to be the best tech decision I made last year.

I started using OS X in 2005 when 10.4 (Tiger) was released. I ditched Linux at the time because I needed to print things and Linux was awful at it; OS X wasn't. I was very productive with OS X and had no serious complaints. When 10.6 (Snow Leopard) came out, I was content.

The pangs of dislike started to show up in 10.7 (Lion). The iOS-like GUI and "features" such as Launchpad didn't resonate with me. As things progressed, I became increasingly annoyed with the environment.

By the time I upgraded to 10.10 (Yosemite), my Macbook Pro no longer felt like a personal computer. Each upgrade was spent fighting the newest bells and whistles in order to keep my environment comfortable and familiar. I spent a lot of time going through the System Preferences, figuring out what I had to turn off in order to get my sanity back.

Furthermore, I found that I had stopped using the majority of the primary apps that ship with OS X: Mail, Safari, iTunes, and Apple Creativity Apps/iLife. For the most part, I ran essentially three apps: Firefox, MailMate, and iTerm2. Most of my work was done in terminals. The culture of the operating system at this point was more about sharing than personal productivity.

In short, I was working against the grain of the environment. It was a gradual transition, but OS X went from a useful tool set to get my work done to an obnoxious ecosystem of which I no longer wanted to be a part.

More damning than the lack of personal connection, though, was the complete lack of transparency and general decline in software quality, as I perceived it.

I basically got no useful information prior to system upgrades. Descriptions like "bug fixes" or "security fixes" say nothing and the links provided weren't much more illuminating. Furthermore, I had no idea as to the size of the download, so I couldn't set any reasonable expectations as to the time I was going to spend waiting.

The 10.10 upgrade was egregious. The fact that the upgrade could take multiple hours due to an incredibly slow directory merge is, simply put, the work of amateurs. Knowing about it ahead of time saved me a lot of frustration, but that kind of thing shouldn't ship. And if it does, at least don't get my hopes up by saying "1 minute remaining" for the better part of an hour.

didn't read

The fuck do you even know about glyphs you nincompoop?

I studied Typography for 7 years and you're going to tell me about glyphs and font smoothing?

Go kys.

Macs have the best type rendering on the planet for a major OS.

The original 1984 Mac invented desktop publishing and to this day 99.9999% of the design industry uses a Mac for a good reason.

Messages in 10.10 is a complete shitshow. It's a stunning regression. I gave up on it shortly after Yosemite was installed. The content was frequently out-of-order, mislabeled as new, and the conversation usually unparsable.

There are lots of other little things that irk me: mds being a hog, distnoted being a hog, lack of virtualization, other system services mysteriously firing up, bogging the system down. It doesn't help that the Macbook Pro I have is one of those lemons that overheats easily, thus kicking the fans into "rocket taking off" mode. At this point, my default position on Apple software in OS X has moved from "probably good" to "probably not OK". They seem more interested in pumping out quantity by way of more upgrades. It's death by a thousand cuts, but it's death nonetheless.

After reflecting on all this, I came to the realization that I was frustrated and disappointed by OS X, and I didn't see it getting better. I simply wasn't enjoying myself.

So I quit.

Once I quit, I was met with different frustrations, but they didn't feel like hopeless frustrations. I've gone back to a desktop system running Linux (for now) and while I consider it markedly inferior to OS X in terms of usability, it feels like a personal computer again. I'm enjoying the experience and I look forward to working with it, even when it's a monumental pain in the ass.

Maybe I just needed a change of scenery, but I do know that I no longer felt welcome in the OS X world, which is ultimately why I had to leave.

I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate.

Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty."

I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. But I am worried sick that OS X is dying, in the sense that it's becoming a platform to deliver people to Apple's (and partners') cloud services and sharing services and that's it. Screw all of that.

One major shot across the bow was the loss of "Save As..." and the change to "Duplicate". WTF, Apple? I now have to do 10 extra steps just to Save As.

It feels like Apple is abandoning its longtime users, the master users, the users who've climbed the pyramid, who've achieved a lot of game levels. It's just going after that huge base of newbies and midlevel people who don't notice or complain about all the changes that really, truly are not improvements. They're just changes. That's the problem in a nutshell: OS X changes because there's new management that wants to put its stamp on things, regardless of whether it improves the productivity of the user or not.

ahh! thanks for taking the time do that. Now I know how to better spot it.
and also thanks for recommending imagemagick. it's great.

I'm a new Mac user, so all the help I can get is greatly appreciated.

OSX doesn't have much of a culture of backwards compatibility, and every update tends to pressure developers into the latest greatest thing. Maintaining old software is just not a cultural value.

Once the developers move, the users pretty much have to. I have an iMac from 2009. I had two OS's on it. Windows 7? Everything still works there. Runs fast, new software is great, etc. OSX 10.6.8? DEAD. It's basically useless. I guess it's nice that apple offers free upgrades, except that they mysteriously make a system that used to be lightning fast extremely slow, even though other OS's seem to run just fine..

Apple has a pretty vicious hardware/software upgrade treadmill.

I resisted updating 10.4 for years; IMO that was the high water mark for OS X, everything has basically been downhill from there. If I could still run 10.4 plus bugfixes and security updates, with modern software, I would.

But that's not possible. They push out new versions of the OS, along with new versions of development tools, which produce software that's not backwards-compatible past a certain point, such that eventually you can't run new software without installing major (0.1) updates. Apple's own products are the worst for this, but eventually you lose 3rd party apps as well.

Even if you resist the demands of new software, you'll eventually get forced to upgrade via hardware. Each generation of Apple hardware has a minimum OS version, keeping you from going back too far. For instance, Mac Pro "quad core" and 8-core systems won't run OS 10.4; Nehalem-based machines won't run 10.6. And Apple has purposely killed off its compatibility layers, dropping first the Classic environment and more recently Rosetta, in order to introduce barriers to running old software.

It's pretty frustrating as a user.

So Windows has become more sane than OS X in terms of security updates?

Windows 7 was released in 2009 and is still receiving security updates until 2020. 10.6 was released in 2011 and has been EOL'd since 2014. Seeing as both people still want to use these products, but one group is being forced not to, that's why I'm saying OS X is taking a less sane stance than Windows.

Is this false?

Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell.

Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships.

Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative.

At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.

Believe it or not, I went back to Windows. Sort of. I'm testing the waters. My big issue is iTunes. Yeah I drank the kool-aid and now have an iTunes library of about 100GB. Despite how much I hate what iTunes has become at least is runs on Windows.

Also, it's easier to "turn features off" in Windows than OSX these days. I'm sad about it though. But after 14 years on Mac I'm done. It was the upgrade to 10.10 that finally pissed me off enough to leave.

By the way, anyone know of a good terminal app for Windows? Not too crazy about Powershell. I have been using Git Bash and that's decent so far.

Both my MBPs (17" 2009, last 17" made (2012?)) had chronic sleep/resume issues, where they would wake up unprompted, either immediately after going to sleep, or after a while (in my bag, turning it into a furnace), or not resume at all when waking up.

The Genius Bar "replaced a daughterboard, which should fix it"[1], which naturally didn't.

In my quest for a solution, I tried everything and met hundreds of poor souls with this problem, of varying technical aptitude - some far exceeding mine.

Changing the sleep mode, examining logs/dmesg/provided no hints, or relief. I gave up and started shutting it down or hibernating.

I don't miss OS X.

I've been considering this for a while -- especially after the Yosemite upgrade, in which my machine has been randomly hanging [0], and in which my machine gets noticeably slower (cmd-tab takes a quarter to a half a second to actually finish switching and repainting windows) over the course of a few days of uptime. OS X software quality is very clearly not a priority at Apple, which is a shame, because this machine is still the best hardware I've ever had the pleasure of using. I don't know what my next machine will be, but if things go at the current pace, I imagine it won't be running OS X.

My previous Linux machine was a Sony VAIO SZ, running Ubuntu 8.04; it did basically everything that I needed, and my only complaint that I'd have if downgrading to it today would be the reduction in battery life. Is there a great set of laptop hardware to run Linux on these days? What do people use when they just want a candy-reduced window system?

[0] MacBook Pro Retina 15", Mid 2012; periodically, usually while I am scrolling through a web page, the machine becomes unresponsive (sound stops, cursor stops), and a minute or two later, the machine powers off. Sometimes it reboots on its own; afterwards, there's no kernel panic log. As far as I can tell, something goes wrong, and after a few minutes, the SMC's watchdog timer gives up, and shoots the machine in the head.

is anyone else not reading any of these

you'll find issues in most laptops that are 5+ years old, tbqh

At my last workplace, the OSX laptops were all 2-3+ years old... and were all incredibly slow. I was always surprised that people could get any work done on them. One woman had an OSX laptop that would boot up with the entire 4GB of memory in use, with no applications or agents loaded except maybe spotify. All the shiny UI in the world doesn't make you more productive when you have to wait for a mouse click to register.

The linux machines were whiteboxes of the same age, and while there was a curl or two in setting them up, were still just as speedy and usable when aged as they were when new.

at least you have support for such an old laptop. if you went with literally any other brand, you'd have been shit out of luck.

Apple has been doing a really bad job at UX for the last few years. (Disclaimer: I say this as a person where I'm currently surrounded by two iMac's, a macbook pro, and an iphone, so I'm not exactly a hater).

The weird thing is I don't even know what they're going for.

There are two trends I've seen:

1) Be more like iOS (for example, the dumb reverse scroll (wait sorry, "natural" scroll") and removing things like UI elements reacting to hovering.) I have no idea what's even clickable anymore. That's idiotic. I get consistency, but you shouldn't kick one platform in the knees to replicate the shortcomings of another. OK so touch screens don't have hover. Still, I'd like to have that back on the desktop. It'd be nice to know what's actually clickable.

2) Being more "social". Like now all my OSX devices want to be connected to my phone, and tell me about every goddamn text message. And if I try to ignore this, I get berated by annoying login screens. "Cancel". Hey maybe you want to see that screen again! NO! fuck off! I have no interest in iCloud, stop asking me five times to log in. Apple seems hell bent into annoying you into signing up for a lot of privacy degrading services.

Not only that, but they just choose bizarre fucking defaults. Like, if I sync my iPhone, it will pop up iPhoto automatically with all my recent photos. Jesus christ. On the plus side, I'm boring, so there's nothing really there, but who the hell thought that was a good idea?!? Does apple have any idea what people actually use cell phone cameras for? Sure there are tame uses, but all the same, I mean jesus christ. That's the dumbest default I've seen, and turning it off is basically impossible.

is it a bot?

no, some nerd copy pasting blog posts

it isn't

This post is half a decade in the making. On June 15th, 2012 I took the plunge and switched from Linux to Mac OS X. 1,585 days later, I am writing to let you know that I have seen the error in my ways and I am back home, running Linux.

The thing is, I have always felt as if a little piece of me had died when I wholly bought into the Apple Ecosystem prison. I had come from a time when we called Apple users really nasty things. And no, I’m not talking about calling them fanboys.

But it “just works”, right?

Sure, Apple stuff does just work. Maybe not 100% of the time, but for a filthy casual, it works well enough. I don’t think I’ve ever been a casual computer user nor am I filthy. Okay, maybe I’m a little bit filthy.

So my quest to switch back to Linux has actually been going on for a couple of years now. I knew going in that I’d most likely be back on Linux but over the last 2 years I’ve been very adamant that I would be switching back soon. Everything just working does make it hard.

Sadly, when asked why I would want to move back to Linux, I would vaguely respond that I was way more productive in Linux. When asked for specific examples, I really didn’t have any.

Time to get real, I had become very productive with OS X. I would argue that I was more productive in OS X because of some of the more advanced hackery I was up to like using Karabiner to create dedicated hotkeys for apps.

Incidentally, this reliance on third-party hackery is ultimately what drove me back. macOS Sierra brought Siri to the desktop and fucked up Karabiner with no resolve in sight. And this isn’t even the first time that Apple has made changes that impacted my productivity.

I’m sorry, I thought this was America.

Full disclosure, I’ve been watching a ton of videos of Richard M. Stallman and Bryan Lunduke as of late. These guys make it really hard for me to stifle my inner Saint IGNUcius.

Believe it or not, I do get it. Apple makes these changes because they are trying to save me from myself. Father knows best and all.

But wait, it’s not “the” system, it’s “my” system. I bought this system with money I earned and should be able to do what I want.

Warranty, schmoranty, over the last four years I have upgraded the RAM in my iMac, only to find out that the system supported twice the RAM that Apple said it could. They lied to me.

Apple also introduced System Integrity Protection (SIP) that made it harder for me to swap my hard disk for an SSD without some recovery mode magic. Said magic needed to be ran after each OS X upgrade. Not ideal.

At least half a dozen times I have upgraded to the lastest OS X only to find that some piece of third-party software that was critical to my productivity no longers worked because of something Apple changed.

These breaking changes usually took over a month to resolve and often times resulting in me buying the latest version of the software that worked on my version of OS X.

What really set me over the edge recently was Dash being pulled from the App Store. Now I don’t even use the app, but I hate the idea of Apple having so much power over their developers.

Even if the nonsense about fake reviews is true, who’s to say that Apple isn’t going to make it so all apps have to go through the App Store in the future? Next macOS, they could easily drop the setting to allow you to install apps that aren’t downloaded from the App Store.

That’s why I’ve switched back to Linux. I’ll take freedom to choose how I use my computer over it just works being saved from myself any day.

Okay so at this point I have been running Linux again full-time for two weeks.

There have been moments of needing to reboot into OS X. Couple times because I have needed to print and once because I needed to test some Docker stuff I had put together in OS X (that’s excusable, right?). Also been some weird wifi issues coming out of suspend mode.

None of this has been a shock because a lot of the issues are the same things I ran into in the past. Freedom though.

All that said, let’s talk about which distro I finally settled on. I am currently running Ubuntu, my Linux distro of choice on the desktop from 2005 to

It’s also been my distro of choice for my servers since 2009.

So why Ubuntu? I’m not running it because it’s what I am most familiar with or because it’s what I used to run. No, I’m running it because of all of the distros I have tried over the last couple of months, it’s the only one that just [mostly] worked on my hardware (MacbookPro12,1).

That said, I avoided settling on Ubuntu for as long as I could. I had a brief love affair with Arch and toyed with vanilla Debian (Jessie, Sid and everything in between) and even openSUSE’s rolling release, Tumbleweed.

All three distributions gave me quite a few issues with the Broadcom wireless card. Most of the issues were during install when access to the Internet was of the utmost importance. I refused to buy an ethernet adaptor for my Mac because Ubuntu didn’t have any issues with the wifi during install.

I mentioned a love affair with Arch. Of the distributions I had played with, Arch was the one I got the furthest with before throwing in the towel. The Arch install is not for the faint of heart but at the end of the day wasn’t all that difficult considering how much documentation there is out there.

Booting into Arch for the first time was quite empowering. Getting GNOME Shell installed and loading a desktop environment made me feel alive. But then part of me died inside when I was constantly being prompted for the wifi password when trying to connect to my home network. Sometimes a reboot would fix it.

I was starting to think that maybe the issue was with my ASUS RT-AC68U router. My fears were diminished when the issue trickled over into not being able to connect to our office wifi either.

Reboots stopped fixing it and I was back in OS X during the day while spending my nights trying to figure out and fix what was happening. This was definitely the Linux I know and love. But seriously, I got shit to do.

After a week or so, I had to finally give up on Arch. Great chance I will be giving it another go in the future though. I can really appreciate the minimalism of the distro and loved that nearly all of my issues had an article or ten out there.

Sadly though, the community does seem to live up to the elitist hype. I didn’t dare ask any questions on the forum because I knew if I had missed something obvious I would have gotten flamed and would have rage quit Archlinux anyway.

So which flavor of Ubuntu did I go with? Even though I had recently steered my buddy from Ubuntu to Ubuntu GNOME I ended up going with vanilla Ubuntu.

In the past, I have run a bunch of different desktop environments in my quest to find the perfect desktop environment. This included Ubuntu Unity for a while when it was initially released. I felt like flavorless Ubuntu was my best bet to be able to experiment with Unity (and Unity 8) as well as run GNOME Shell if I chose to.

Currently I am running GNOME Shell because of my gripes with how Unity glitches out when autohiding the panel and no way to hide the top menu.

Before I discuss my current desktop environment, let’s rewind to 2012 before I had switched to OS X. At the time, I was running xmonad as my primary desktop environment and was dabbling with the then, fairly new GNOME Shell. This was after a stint of running Ubuntu Unity which was also still pretty new at the time.

According to a previous post of mine I was also diving back into using vim. It’s funny because I have used vim off and [mostly] on for the last 16 to 18 years or so. For the life of me, I can’t remember what else I may have been using at that time other than vim with significantly less plugins.

Okay, so I had moved from xmonad (a tiling window manager) to OS X (a floating or stacking window manager). It was a pretty painful process as I had a decent amount of muscle memory banked for xmonad and OS X at the time didn’t have any way to snap windows natively.

Eventually I had stumbled upon Spectacle after trying just about every other window snap tool out there. Spectacle scratched my itch of being able to position windows with hotkeys. Nothing too fancy. This is something that OS X still falls quite short on and the current split view isn’t even close in my opinion.

Over the years I had grown very fond of being able to arrange windows with keyboard shortcuts. In fact, I had grown to prefer the hotkeys over being forced into the typical tiling window manager paradigm of every window being forced into a grid.

I had dabbled with some tiling window managers (i3wm and awesomewm specifically) initially since I was a big fan of xmonad back in the day. Similar to my decision to run Ubuntu over Arch, for sanity (and productivity’s) sake, I figured it would be better to use a non-tiling window manager.

What made this decision even easier is that both Unity and GNOME Shell have window placement hotkeys out of the box.

Something else I had grown accustomed to in OS X was using hotkeys to switch between apps. I’m not talking about using CMD+TAB or ALT+TAB, I’m talking about using CMD+# where # maps to a certain app. Unity was able to do this out of the box and I was able to find an extension for GNOME Shell to do the same.

Those two things were my biggest must-haves during the transition. I was pretty amazed at how both Unity and GNOME Shell were able satisfy me with minimal effort in comparison to OS X. macOS Sierra broke Karabiner which made my app hotkeys possible.

Right now, I’m primarily running GNOME Shell. It’s not entirely perfect as I kinda hate the Activities view. Do I really need to see all of my open windows when I am trying to launch another app?

Where GNOME Shell excels compared to Unity for me is in hiding the panel as well as the top menu. Unity has always giving me shit when trying to hide the panel. Eventually it would just decide it’s not hidden anymore and windows would be behind the panel. I’m unsure how this is even still an issue, it’s been a major gripe of mine since the initial release.

GNOME Shell also had an extension to hide the top bar, something that doesn’t seem to be possible with Unity. I like to maximize my screen real estate and I find things like menu bars and panels to be a waste. In fact, on OS X I had configured the Dock to be hidden indefinitely. Probably should write a blog post on that too!

All that said, GNOME Shell is my choice for the moment, but I suspect I will end up moving back to a tiling-window manager within the next few months. i3wm captivated me and there is a way to hide the status bar with a hotkey. I should be able to configure some additional hotkeys to launch apps as well.

I’m a simple guy and I compute in a very specific way. In comparison to a younger version of myself, I feel like most of the modern niceties are just bothersome and tend to be a hinderance to my productivity.

owned

Before switching to OS X, I was running Ubuntu codename whatever and had my local system built out as close to my production environment as possible.

I would install nginx, Apache, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, PHP and whatever the hell else I needed to be functional. It was very painless as everything was a sudo apt-get install ... away.

One of my contingencies for moving to OS X was that I would be able to develop locally in the same way I did on Linux. There was no way I would develop inside of a virtual machine.

There was a small bit of a learning curve since I was quite the OS X newbie. I figured out how to get things up and running with Homebrew, but for the most part is was painless.

That said, Homebrew is a piece of shit and I missed apt every time I had to use it. Don’t get me started on Apple making changes to OS X that would fuck up Homebrew.

Moving back to Linux, I assumed I would be able to revert to my old ways and be back in action. This was only sort of true.

In the time since I switched away from Linux, some libraries ended up being updated. Specifically lib-curl which ended up causing me problems with one of the projects I hack on.

The issue is that an older npm package, node-curl, which the project relied on was coded against an older version of lib-curl.

No big deal, fork it, fix it, get back to work.

This got me thinking, this will probably happen again in the future and I need a better way to work on projects that rely on older libraries.

At the time I was having issues, macOS Sierra was fairly new any the folks that had upgraded to it weren’t having any issues with the project dependencies the way I was. That was until we onboarded a new developer.

As a new developer, he needed to set things up from scratch and did not have the core of our codebase built yet. Upon doing so, he ran into the same issue I did and fortunately my fork of node-curl worked for him.

Building the entire system isn’t something we do regularly, so it’s not surprising that folks that had upgraded to Sierra hadn’t run into issues. Now my fleeting thoughts of tomorrow’s problems were my main focus.

What’s a guy to do? Mess with all the things, of course!

I messed with Docker (in a un-Docker-like way) but wasn’t really sold on it. Then I messed with Vagrant and was even less sold on it. Then I decided to drink the Docker-aid and go about things the way Docker intended.

When I say I went about Docker in an un-Docker-like way, I am referring to attempting to build out a single container that did it all. Web server, database, cache datastore all in one container. This resulted in needing to get systemd working in the container.

This ended up being a clusterfuck and a half considering I didn’t have much experience with Docker and was learning as I went.

Reapproaching things with an open mind about needing to have multiple containers, I was able to get things up and running fairly easy. There are still things that I wish Docker did, like being able to mount a volume during the container build, but otherwise, smooth sailing.

What’s been great about Docker is that I can better match my containers to the production environments. Those dependency issues I talked about earlier are no more.

Where can I subscribe to your blog?

I have since converted a few other projects of mine to use Docker. Not all of them though, for somethings it’s just overkill and I’m cool with just running stuff locally. This blog, which runs on Jekyll and is hosted on GitHub Pages, is a good example of a project that I don’t want to pollute with Docker.

Even though I am now using Docker for some of my more complex projects, I still have absolutely no desire to run Docker in production. It just doesn’t make sense to me as I can run older LTS releases of Ubuntu and avoid dependency issues.

In scenarios where production doesn’t match my local system, Docker will absolutely be a part of my toolchain for local development.

Until something better comes along, of course ;)

On this fifth week of writing about my transition back to Linux, I’m pretty much tapped out. That said, I did want to do one last post to wrap things up.

This is less of a “conclusion” and more of a “I’ve been running Linux for the past month after a few year hiatus and here’s some observations” type deal.

The fact is, the only real conclusion is that I shouldn’t have ever switched to OS X in the first place. But that was addressed in part 1 :)

Ok, so after a month back in the Linux saddle, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at least a few times. Here’s some of the highlights.
Window management hotkeys

One of my major painpoints with OS X was the lack of window management keyboard shortcuts and the reliance on yet another third-party app to do what I felt was the job of the operating system / window manager. Both Unity and Gnome Shell have window placement hotkeys available out of the box, and it’s glorious.
How Chrome treats Chrome Apps

As I’ve been attempting to embrace Chrome Apps a bit more, I ran into something peculiar. On OS X, Chrome Apps are treated as Chrome windows. Quite the pain in the ass when you are trying to get back to your browser and Hangouts or Keep pop up.
Always on top windows

I had forgotten that this was even a thing. Want a window to always be on top? Right-click the title bar and make it so. Easily one of my favorite features of Linux desktop environments. Super userful when you’re developing pop-up windows or just want to keep your notes app up in the corner of the screen.

Terminal sizing and snapping

I’m aware that I should just be doing everything in tmux and not messing around with native tabbing. Sometimes I want something isolated to another tab, don’t judge me. With both Terminal.app and iTerm2 when I would close all but one tab, the window would shrink a bit. Not the end of the world as I have hotkeys to resize the windows.

But wait, I also had a ton of issues with getting OS X terminal apps to snap to a portion of the screen with Spectacle. The iTerm2 beta from a while back was better about this but as you know, I switched from iTerm2 back to Terminal at one point.

Gnome terminal has been a dream in this regard.
Too many choices

It’s part of why Linux Sucks but also why it’s great. I’ve been able to test drive a half dozen window managers across a few different distributions during this transition. Some things are better than others, but more options means more people are trying to solve problems how they feel is best. That’s a win for everybody.
Renewed passion for minimalism

For me, when I’m presented with too many options, I try to figure out whether I need any of the choices. It may seem counter-intuitive but a lot of times I can move forward with a more simplistic solution. This frugality has been restored in me as of late because in Linux, it’s way easier to take away than it is in macOS. I’ve also gutted my vimrc recently, but I’m saving that for another post ;)

Side note / affiliate link warning, if you haven’t read it, you should check out Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I’m planning on re-reading it soon as it was just that good and very relevant to this point.

you sly girl, you...

Re-evaluation of your software toolchain

Kind of plays into the previous statement about minimalism and honestly is true for switching OSes, even to non-Linux ones. When you switch systems you are forced to re-evaluate the tools you use. Some tools aren’t going to be available. Perhaps you’ll find a better tool in the process. Since we are creatures of habit we get stuck in a cycle of running shitty software that has outlived it’s usefulness because it’s what we know.
A sense of accomplishment

Part of why I moved away from Linux was because I wanted to spend more time being productive and less time troubleshooting problems with my system. But, you can’t be productive 100% of the time, and implementing solutions always feels good.
The actual conclusion

So that does it. I’m back to running Linux.

I am keeping OS X (El Cap, forever El Cap) around for a bit longer, just because I love Ableton Live so much and it’s still convenient to use FaceTime with the family.

I couldn’t be happier with the decision even as I run into little quirks that force an afternoon of tinkering.

As I watch Apple creating a dongle economy, I know that I’ll probably end up being PC-only again within the next year.

That all being said, I recently switched from Mac OS X back to Linux, AMA.

Ironically we are moving back to Linux after having started on it four years ago as a company, then switching to Windows, then switching to Apple. When we started we had students as young as eight. We now start at 10 and have generally older students, who respond better to Linux.

Originally I bought the cheapest laptops I could find and put Ubuntu on them. The experience for students connecting to servers from home was hindered, however, by not using the same system in class as from home. (There was no CodeAnywhere back then, which I don’t like for lots of reasons including not being able to change the colors to match our own theme.) So we put Windows back on them and went the Git for Windows bash-like solution and documented that. But for young students setting that all up at home was still to big a headache and few did it. We even had workshops for parents to teach them how to install git-bash and connect. Still very low from-home connections forced us to consider Apple.

We jumped in with both feet and it worked. Students could now ensure they had the exact same system we had from home and parents were excited to purchase a Mac if they did not have one already. The only customization needed was to download our Solarized Terminal config file and import it into the included system Terminal default. We recommended the Mac minis (at $500) for those concerned with cost, Mac Air (at $1000). Only students dead set on getting a gaming machine didn’t like that option, but their parents liked that games were restricted from a Mac.

Then Apple removed the ESC key without even considering for one second what that would do to thousands of die-hard vi developers I knew they had lost their way (even though everyone with an American keyboard uses control-[ instead of escape). They are putting everything into ARM and are probably very wise to do so but it is not the same experience. The MacOS team has been placed under the iOS team as secondary. This says a lot about their priorities.

As a long time Linux guy (since the 90s when I even tried Machlinux on Mac hardware) I can say I fully appreciate your insights and am surprisingly happy to find you made the same conclusion as us here at SkilStak. We will be officially moving to Linux Mint on everything (including Raspberry Pi, by the way). We also run Kali on bare metal. All other Linux distros we experiment with during our LPIC lab work.

It is worth noting that anyone considering a career in backend development, administration, and operations should probably run Linux as their primary system just for all the extra help dealing with the same type of system one would encounter as the server. I followed this path for over 15 years and it made me the best Linux/UNIX/AIX admin I could imagine being because fixing all those annoyance with drivers and such actually informed me about other elements of the system. Pure developers may not appreciate the added time fiddling with this stuff, but it makes you a better technologist if you go through that pain, which was even greater in the days before Ubuntu.

A year earlier I decided to switch from OSX to Ubuntu, so now is a good time to make a little retrospective. TL;DR: Linux now offers a pleasant desktop user experience and there's no way back for me.

I was a Linux user 10 years ago but moved to being a Mac one, mainly because I was tired of maintaining an often broken system (hello xorg.conf), and Apple had quite an appealing offer at the time: a well-maintained Unix platform matching beautiful hardware, sought-after UX, access to editor apps like Photoshop and MS Office, so best of both worlds.

To be frank, I was a happy Apple user in the early years, then the shine started to fade; messing up your system after upgrades became more frequent, Apple apps grown more and more bloated and intrusive (hello iTunes), UX started turning Kafkaian at times, too often I was finding myself tweaking and repairing stuff from the terminal...

The trigger was pulled when Apple announced their 2015 MacBook line, with strange connectivity decisions like having a unique port for everything and using dongles: meh. If even their top notch hardware started to turn weird, it was probably time to look elsewhere. And now I see their latest MBP line with the Esc key removed (so you can't escape anymore, haha), I'm kinda comforted in my decision.

Meanwhile, since I've joined Mozilla and the Storage team, I could see many colleagues happily using Linux, and it didn't feel like they were struggling with anything particular. Oddly enough, it seemed they were capable of working efficiently, both for professional and personal stuff.

I finally took the plunge and ordered a Lenovo X1 Carbon, then started my journey to being a Linux user again.

Choosing a distro

I didn't debate this for days, I installed the latest available Ubuntu right away as it was the distribution I was using before moving to OSX (I even contributed to a book on it!). I was used to Debian-based systems and knew Ubuntu was still acclaimed for its ease of use and great hardware support. I wasn't disappointed as on the X1 everything was recognized and operational right after the installation, including wifi, bluetooth and external display.

I was greeted with the Unity desktop, which was disturbing as I was a Gnome user back in the days. Up to a point I installed the latter, though in its version 3 flavor, which was also new to me.

I like Gnome3. It's simple, configurable and made me feel productive fast. Though out of bad luck or skills and time to spend investigating, a few things were not working properly: fonts were huge in some apps and normal in others, external display couldn't be configured to a different resolution and dpi ratio than my laptop's, things like that. After a few weeks, I switched back to Unity, and I'm still happily using it today as it has nicely solved all the issues I had with Gnome (which I still like a lot though).
The pain points when coming from OSX

Let's be honest, the Apple keyboard French layout is utter crap, but as many things involving muscle memory, once you're used to it, it's a pain in the ass to readapt to anything else. I struggled for something like three weeks fighting old habits in this area, then eventually got through.

Last, a bunch of OSX apps are not available on Linux, so you have to find their equivalent, when they exist. The good news is, most often they do.

The Web is your App Store

What also changed in last ten years is the explosion of the Web as an application platform. While LibreOffice and The Gimp are decent alternatives to MS Office and Photoshop, you now have access to many similarly scoped Web apps like Google Docs and Pixlr, provided you're connected to the Internet. Just ensure using a modern Web browser like Firefox, which luckily ships by default in Ubuntu.

For example I use IRCCloud for IRC, as Mozilla has a corporate account there. The cool thing is it acts as a bouncer so it keeps track of messages when you go offline, and has a nice Android app which syncs.
When the Web isn't enough

There is obviously lots of things Web apps can't do, like searching your local files or updating your system. And let's admit that sometimes for specific tasks native apps are still more efficient and better integrated (by definition) than what the Web has to offer.
Launcher & file search

I was a hardcore Alfred.app user on OSX. On Linux there's quite no strict equivalent though Unity Dash, Albert or synapse can cover most of its coolness.

If you use the text shortcuts feature of Alfred (or if you use TextExpander), you might be interested in AutoKey as well.

report for spam and ignore him

Thought I'd join in

owned

>fruity toddler OS
>""""""""comfy"""""""""""

>The fuck do you even know about glyphs you nincompoop?
Quite a lot.

>I studied Typography for 7 years
Don't feel bad, give it another 7 and one day you may finally see how those thick-ass glyphs and tiny inner openings in letters such as "e" look nothing like what font designers intended.

>you're going to tell me about glyphs and font smoothing?
I can also tell you about antialiasing, kerning, subpixel smoothing, pixel snapping and other things, but what's the point if MacOS doesn't let you change them anyway? For a platform that markets itself as "designer friendly", MacOS sure likes to shit on font designers' hard work.

Becuase it has better UI design.
When you spend stupid amounts of money on a mac, you are mostly paying for the research and development of their products - the MVP is the OS.
Also, it's harder to install an Illegal copy of OSX then it is windows - so even less money for MicroShite and more for Crapple.

I'm literally trying to recreate this situation, but I can't. I don't have this problem and I've never encountered anyone who has. Fluke?

>better UI design
>deletes all your files at random

I do on iTerm2. But it's the only place, and it only takes me 5 secs to grab it.

looks like red star woke up

Summer can't end soon enough.

the comfiest

not OP but bash is not POSIX compatible so it's irrelevant

Can you super+right click to resize windows on macOS?

>that makes regular fonts look bold

That's what the fonts are supposed to look like you autist. Ask any typographer in the world. OS X is the only operating system that actually renders fonts properly.

owned

>macshit
>blurry ass bloated font rendering diarrhea
>good

image compression.

This is patently false. macOS no longer has the best font rendering, and hasn't for a very long time.

>onscreen thin looking like printed regular is proper font rendering
>onscreen regular looking like printed bold is proper font rendering
>onscreen bold looking like printed bold is proper font rendering
If you never considered killing yourself, now might be the time.

>using macos
>just deletes all my files from backup and local
>i don't even have to confirm
maximum comfy

Because personal preference is subjective?

retard

install gentoo double nigger

Because its catered to weak men and women.
IT has to be comfy.

What music players are you guys using?