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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

> I'm sorry, but no Linux DE I've ever used beats macOS in terms of stability. The file explorers are also a joke and frequently changing.

Dolphin on KDE hasn’t changed in 10 years and is far more functional than Finder. Frankly I think Finder is an appalling file manager so I’m surprised to hear anyone advocate it.

> MacBooks are solid laptops. Every other laptop I've owned hasn't stood the test of time as well as my Mac.

5 years ago I would have agreed with you but MBPs these days are really built more like expensive consumer devices rather than workstations that expect to see heavy usage.

Ultimately I think the real reason people use Macs is just personal preference and there isn’t any tangible, provable benefits of one over the other. Despite our engineering minds thinking every decision can be distilled down to fact and reason.

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At this point the #1 is that I believe directly paying relatively small developers money for software produces by far the most user friendly (in many senses) desktop software. On the mac, that model is still thriving. Everywhere else you have maybe a handful of great options. Apart from that you get some Electron SaaS, some ancient professional software and some messy open source options. If you‘re lucky maybe some mac ports like Tower or Paw.

I don't think that feasable from a security standpoint. Ideally, software would be open-source and authored under the supervision of a handful of trusted parties.

The metaphorical "chain of trust" is strongest when it's composed of a few strong links, and when its cracks are visible.

What you're suggesting is that we should use a model with many small links and invisible cracks.

I‘m talking about desktop software for personal computers, not infrastructure software or services or anything. I trust the software developer and I trust apple. There’s a signature/certificate chain between those two. It’s fine.

Of course that‘s not acceptable for some people and for some use cases but it is for me.

I wouldn’t say I work with files a lot, but when I do, Finder seems to work ‘fine’. What do you find ‘appalling’ about it? If I’m missing the option to make my life much easier by using an alternative I’d like to at least try something else out.

You know those completely useless files (.DS_Store, ._foo.bar, etc.) that you see whenever you expand an archive or clone a repository from a developer who uses a Mac? Finder drops those turds.

Who cares?

Anyone who regularly works with FOSS. Which was the target demographic being discussed to begin with.

John does, apparently.

You can’t input paths for starters. That means you can’t open dot files or navigate dot directories. Of which there are a great many in FOSS. The answer is to open up a terminal and run ‘open .blah’, which is just an appalling work around to a simple problem. Even Windows handles this use case better and that’s saying something.

CMD+Shift+. reveals hidden files in Finder.

Great, another non-discoverable key combination I need to memorise. You can guarantee I’d have forgotten that by the time I next need to use it.

GUIs are meant to be simple for discovering features. I really dislike how Apple hides away all the useful features. It doesn’t need to be this way and it makes working with macOS a real pain in the arse.

You can input paths with “Go To Folder” (Command+Shift+G by default) but it's a bit cumbersome.

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