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Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

I was nodding along, until you said that "on OSX things mostly just work". Oh boy. I have fought homebrew, I have fought Apple destroying permissions on each update, and the OS having embarassing mistakes.

Linux: not much better.

Everything sucks, they just suck in a variety of different flavors.

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At least the updates work. I’ve lost count of the number of times Windows update has failed. Reboot loops, half-installed updates, updates conflicting with each other, and updates that killed my internet connection. At least I haven’t had an update brick my machine. Yet.

And don’t get me started on the upgrade process. Quicker and easier to drive to the store and buy a new machine.

> At least the updates work.

Ehhh, I had a whale of a time upgrading a machine (standard Core i7 desktop) from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04. Read: I lost the entire machine and had to reinstall from scratch.

Also, Linux support for new hardware isn't amazing. So when I upgraded to a Ryzen APU, it basically wasn't possible to get Linux running on it without resorting to a beta kernel and lots of manual futzing around. WSL has been a godsend for me.

Yes you’re right there I suppose. The point is I pick the sandwich with the least amount of shit in it if I can.

It depends on domain. I hate working with MacOS APIs far more than either Windows or Linux. They don't give a damn about backwards compatibility, force you to use programming languages nobody uses on any other platform (no, I don't care how "nice" it is), and change without a moment's notice. They actively shun and deprecate open source solutions, and seem to go out of their way to be that special snowflake. You could say certain things perform better on Mac, but other things (like graphics) are utter garbage due to the lack of first party driver support. You can install bootcamp on a Mac and get better games and graphics editing performance immediately for example. That plus the overexpensive hardware and lack of a real keyboard and I'm just done.

The plan was always for Linux to become the best operating system for everybody. The plan was not to become the best by everybody else deciding to suck. Still, a victory is a victory...

I've had a pretty good experience running MacPorts instead of homebrew. It's easily been the best package management experience I've on a non-Linux OS.

Interesting, had the opposite experience. Homebrew does almost everything very nicely for me. Macports not as much, although to be fair this was years ago.

My last experience with homebrew was a while ago, but it was a jankfest. The repo was littered with arbitrary major/minor versions of the same packages and the bottling metaphors (bottles, casks, tap, pour -- a cellar even?) are IMO contrived and do nothing to make things understandable. At one point I had to go create a Github API token and set it in my environment just to make the thing work again. And lastly, I just couldn't take seriously the idea that piping the output of curl into sudo is the install method for something that wants to spread itself across your filesystem.

Maybe I'm old, but it struck me like they're reinventing the wheel without even trying to understand what works with existing package management.

macports forces you to install 15GB application that lots of users don't need(xcode). Homebrew just requires the cli tools.

Not true. You can use the Xcode command line tools now, without actually installing the full Xcode. I do this on my home machine and it's fine.

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