Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> Six years later, it less and less "Just Works", started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system.... GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years.

So... it's not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else.

If people aren't going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

The problem for me is OSX still takes less maintenance than Linux and provides a higher quality experience than Linux.

I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower

And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicated GPU is both in use and out of use until you run a graphical benchmark and measure the current draw of your laptop)

And I prefer Homebrew to apt. I've never had Homebrew fail to install other packages because I had a package install break previously, which is always something that drove me nuts about apt.

I'm surprised git UIs have lock-in power. Of all my development constraints, git is the last place I would have expected to find resistance switching OSs.

But then again, I could never do things in tower as fast as I could on the command line, so I dropped it fairly fast. It's not super useful replacement without an interactive rebase. Nice for viewing history, though.

Who said Git UIs have lock in power?

Are you intentionally ignoring the context in which I mentioned Tower?

Not to my reading!

The alternative app to tower on FreeBSD would be git itself, which had a superset of features, would it not?

No, OS X has Git, that's the equivalent. I actually don't know Free BSD well enough to say for BSD, but for Linux for example I'd say it's Sourcetree or SmartGit.

Your getting hung up on the Tower example, Tower is far from the only example of OS X applications having a smoother UI than nix. I always felt it comes down to a culture issue, nix users don't mind the lack of polished GUIs if there's a command line tool (which you're so continently demonstrating)

I had always assumed that SourceTree was a portable Qt app (it looks like it, doesn't it?), but it's only available on macOS and Windows.

Tower and GitUp are a huge lock-in into macOS for me. Tower for line-by-line staging/discarding, GitUp for minor history fix-ups (editing a commit message without remembering the CLI command, etc.).

For what it's worth, git add, git checkout, and git reset all take the -p (or --patch) option, which allows selection of sub-sections of files to stage, discard, or unstage, respectively.

Homebrew and a Vagrant managed Linux VM depending on the situation. I'm seriously considering moving to Linux next time I'm switching my work laptop.

Did this at work, haven't looked back since. Having first class package management support is something I never want to live without again. I still use a lot of virtual machines, but mostly to keep different projects separated.

By the way, is it just me or have the vms better disk performance but slower graphics in Linux?

Any particular software you host your VM in? How easy/hard is it to get the VM networking with the host machine?

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