Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

"The primary issue was I spent too much time telling OS X to shut up and leave me alone. Some of this is me and how poorly my brain operates these days – I’ve had 3 kids in the last 5 years. I don’t like to play the twins card, but having twins does something to your brain. The doubled up sleep deprivation and long, long periods of stress altered me in non-trivial ways."

He's going to spend a lot more time and energy installing and dealing with FreeBSD than he ever spent telling OS X to leave him alone. There are plenty of good reasons to use a free operating system, but these days "reduction in time spent" is never going to be one of them. Running an OS that is not pre-installed is always going to be burdensome.

It took him plenty of time just to select all that hardware--and then he had to actually put it together. And if anything doesn't work--good luck.

I understand what he's saying about focus but as an experienced user of free operating systems I can say that there are many things with them that can cause you to break focus. Already the post has discussed (0) problems reassociating with wifi, (1) bindsym to get the thing to lock when the lid shuts, (2) no satisfactory password sync app, and (3) bad copy/paste.

It doesn't make sense to purely think about it in terms of time spent. For instance I've been unhappy with Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, its performance is crappy, the search is slow etc. Finally a couple of weeks ago I took the time to spend two full days setting up mbsync+mu+mu4e+Emacs just the way I want, the setup is awesome, and my E-Mail no longer annoys me.

Sure in terms of pure time spent I'll probably take years to gain that back, but there's something to be said about not having a grating sense of annoyance in your daily life from the tools you use professionally, and that's worth more than just the time you save.

Very much so. Small but repeated or continuous annoyances have a cumulative effect on general sense of happiness.

I myself use fetchmail, notmuch[1], and emacs (with w3m for HTML messages) for my email. Gmail-like search and filter capabilities (I think better, actually) and the comfort of using emacs.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/

I switched my desktops and laptop from FreeBSD to OS X around 10 years ago, while running FreeBSD and Linux for my servers. The main reason was the "it just works" nature of OS X on the laptop. Too much hassle getting sound and WiFi working on FreeBSD back then, plus the need to share Powerpoint files with colleagues.

Well, I recently wasted several days with a failed 10.11 to 10.11.1 minor upgrade (short story: won't boot; restore from backup, redo upgrade, won't boot, clean install (boots), restore files from backup, won't boot, etc, long process of disabling kernel extensions left over from previous releases, eventually gave up, clean install, only restore /users, finally OK, but need to manually reinstall all apps). THis isn't my only OS X upgrade failure, but it was the most painful, and only a point release too. Also had an iphone 4 a while back get bricked from an OS upgrade, as a result of which I'm no longer in the iOS ecosystem, and quite happy about that.

So, Apple, no it doesn't just work anymore. FreeBSD, on the other hand - never a major problem with upgrades in 18 years of running it. Occasionally minor niggles, but usually because I didn't read the release notes. With OS X, it mostly works, but if it doesn't work, you're mostly out of luck.

I absolutely agree with the OP about it not feeling like it's under my control anymore. Unexpected 4.5 GB background downloads when I'm on a high-cost link - wonderful, thanks Apple, so kind! I'm spending about as much time now trying to turn off OS X features as I ever spend trying to enable then on FreeBSD.

> I'm spending about as much time now trying to turn off OS X features as I ever spend trying to enable then on FreeBSD.

This goes directly in my quotes trove, thanks :-)

I've run openbsd for years as my main desktop OS. Really it doesn't distract me at all (far less than OSX or Windows do) and pretty much everything from installation to using software packages "just works."

I've used it on an older Dell Precision laptop as well, zero problems other than I needed to change the internal WiFi card to a supported one (other option would have been a mini USB wifi).

I've even run it on a PowerBook G4, honestly pretty sluggish there but it works.

Really for his claimed needs of "openssh and a terminal" I don't see why any linux or BSD would not have been totally fine. Any number of distros will do that fine out of the box with zero tweaking.

I think a more proper way of saying it, to me, is that "how the time is spent."

Spending 1 hour digging around the root cause of a failing driver is more interesting to a geek than spending 10 seconds closing windows.

Besides, if someone is experienced in a certain distro of a free OS, then it won't take too much time to setup his/her environment. I put most of my config files on Google Drive and it would just take me several minutes to setup my xmonad + vim environment.

> He's going to spend a lot more time and energy installing and dealing with FreeBSD than he ever spent telling OS X to leave him alone.

It's not about spending time. It's about spending attention, and especially not controlling when you spend it. It's much more frustrating in the long run than having to put effort in configuring one's workspace.

Yes, free software OSes aren't just plug-and-play with their setup and take some upfront effort. But once set up, they don't tend to break or nag. The article is pretty clear in showing that the author doesn't mind troubleshooting, but what annoys him is having to keep turning the same thing off due to updates.

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