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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

I also use Mac as a glorified unix OS with an WiFi that works, printing that works, laptop sleep and awake that works, and UI that works across external monitors with various DPI settings seamlessly.

I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but:

1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops)

2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos

3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.

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I wish I could say the same. I have tasted the dark side(seamless integration between iPhone and Mac) and can’t imagine moving away from it without a significant irritation of reduced productivity.

Some examples of perks to be had because of giving in to the ecosystem..

1. Copy something on phone, and paste it on any application on Mac (and vice versa)

2. Instantly access all photos taken on iPhone for quick edits on Mac, or even to upload somewhere on a website(passport, dr.license and such).

3. Notes.app that is the same on iPhone and Mac because of iCloud. Notes has become my knowledge base.

4. I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

I can’t imagine the independent way of doing things again :-(

Back when I used android there were ways to do all of these. I can’t recall the clipboard app, but 2 and 3 are just Google photos and Google keep. #4 doesn’t even require an extra device. You can import a signature from a signed piece of paper into Preview directly.

As someone leaving Googles Prison, I'm currently looking for new ways to do this.

It definitely cost me a weekend for the photos thing, but at least I'm not locked in.

At least Google Photos works on android and iOS. Apple Photos only works on iOS/macOS.

KDEConnect covers a lot of this, including clipboard sync across multiple devices running the daemon.

It's nowhere as polished and Just Works® as Apple's Continuity, but it's great for me with a desktop and laptop running Fedora, and mobile devices running LineageOS.

> I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

Similarly, you can right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone. Massive productivity booster for anyone shuffling lots of papers.

I love reading threads like this.

> right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone

Had no idea that was an option, until you mentioned it. Hiding right under my nose. Handy feature.

I did not know either. The I decided to check if I could do the same anywhere on the finder and guess what it is possible. I does not work on my network drive, but this is cool. :)

alternative for 4. open Preview, and use Annotate->Signature to configure a signature to drop in straight on your Mac.

That does not seems to be unique. You can do all that on linux (or windows) with android as well either out of the box or after installing kdeconnect. Also then you are not tied to icloud but can use google drive/one drive/dropbox/... .

Yes. You can jump through a bunch of hoops to get a similar desktop / phone integration with Linux (or Windows) and Android using a variety of different apps...or you could just use it out-of-the-box since it's all baked in to macOS and iOS. You can tell yourself that it's 'all the same' all you want, but I've tried, and it's not the same.

> using a variety of different apps

One is hardly a "variety of different apps".

I took a photo signature many years ago and have been pasting into pdfs rasterized by gimp since then.

The whole concept is kinda ridiculous, but I never would have thought that it takes a Mac and iphone to do it.

There are also privacy implications to all that integration that honestly have me a bit wary of sharing any personal information with my work Mac.

Just to pick on another, the idea that anyone would be uploading photos of their passport and drivers license is a bit crazy. That said, I could easily with Ubuntu.

Do you hear yourself? “ I paste my signature into a PDF and then rasterize with gimp”

Is any normal user going to do that? Why the hell should I have to open a image editing app to sign a PDF?!

Why has no Linux PDF viewer added signatures as an option so far?

This is why I left Linux for MacOS

Is cutting and pasting a tough one? Maybe the big word scared ya? I could have written open, with no change in meaning.

If it's not clear I didn't sign it in the technical sense, no one would know what to do with it, there's not a widely supported standard for that. These were business folks who wanted a png/jpeg image of the form with my scribble on it.

An image editor is perfect for that it turns out, and it takes two steps, three if you count save.

> Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil.

You can save your signature in the Preview app and then it's available to paste into any PDF.

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/fill-out-and-sign-pd...

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