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Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

What are people doing with their computers that a Mac is so stifling? I'm late to the Mac game, have been on it for about a decade, and was a 15-year Windows and Linux desktop user before that. Still, I don't even know what it might be.

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I've used Windows, Linux, Mac extensively for decades and I also frankly have no idea. The other responses to you as of this writing seem to be nitpicking and not anything truly foundational to the user experience.

Docker Desktop is relatively bad compared to native docker on Linux. If you spend your day doing that macOS is very stifling. Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

Ah—I've done a lot of Docker on Mac, but just with the command line tools, so I don't know how Docker Desktop is (on any platform).

> Or if you want to change a keyboard shortcut Apple don't allow you to, like cmt+tab.

The only keyboard customization I do is something that Mac makes at least as easy as Linux (use Caps Lock as an extra control) but I bet it is frustrating if you want to customize stuff outside the cases that they explicitly support remapping. That makes sense.

To run Docker on macOS you need Docker Desktop or any of the alternatives. The docker CLI is really slow compared to native, at least with Docker Desktop, and i Rancher Desktop failed installing.

If you are used to using gnu user land you’ll be using a utility like brew to install the gnu components. The bsd counterparts are just off enough to find something a bit off on most of them.

I really dislike finder. I’ve not found a sane replacement.

Updates for me took 10-15 minutes. Rebooting a few times. Relegated to answering slacks on phone during that time.

Office is also awful on the Mac. I wound up using office in a windows VM because a lot of stuff was broken opening complex documents.

My newest job I asked for a windows laptop. WSL2 is ok. I just run vscode connected to wsl and do my work there and use native office. Those two apps, postman, and chromium (chrome and slack) is really my stack and it works well enough. I would rather use Linux but our IT department have a big thumbs down since they have no clue what they are doing regarding securing that.

I am not saying it will solve your problems, but I like PathFinder on the Mac. I use Directory Opus on Windows. They fulfill the same niche & need for me. I find Finder and Explorer to be anemic in terms of functionality.

Microsoft Office has gotten better but it’s still bad on Macos. I think it’s by design.

I had to start using mac for my current job as of last year and have no idea. once you learn about cmd-` and the weirdness with minimizing, and installed rectangle, i became as productive as I am on windows

finder to drive navigation to native desktop apps + a first class unix terminal nails my productivity needs. I ended up buying an m1 pro pretty soon after getting accustomed

Similar usage pattern here. MacOS desktop design is not perfect, but it's fine.

I could never have the majority of apps in full screen though, I switch apps far too often. My desktop is just a pile of windows on top of each other.

The options for package management on macOS aren’t great in my experience, coming from using Linux on all my personal machines. Homebrew exists but it always feels bolted on and I’ve had things break in interesting ways using it. Nix might be better, I don’t have much experience using it on macOS.

Also, tiling window managers.

That's because most mac users fall to the well-crafted publicity of Homebrew, and remain ignorant about the better https://www.macports.org/ package management system. MacPorts was inspired by the FreeBSD Ports Collection, is created by Apple engineers, used by Apple internally, is unix-y and has more packages than Homebrew. (But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have).

I started as a MacPorts user, and moved because it managed to break itself about quarterly over the two years or so that I used it, usually in some way weird enough that it was easier to just remove all my packages (rm the whole directory) and start over than try to fix it. HomeBrew's done that zero times for me, in about eight years.

I've extensively used Portage (gentoo), rpm (Fedora, Mandrake), and dpkg/apt (Debian and Ubuntu), and MacPorts, plus put in a smaller amount of time with several others. HomeBrew is, overall, my favorite.

[EDIT] And this in particular:

> But yeah, I think both Homebrew and MacPorts still fall behind Linux / xBSD packaging systems in terms of the number of packages they have

HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used. AFAIK only Arch and Portage even come close.

[EDIT]

Downvoted for countering someone's passive-aggressive insult ("people who don't like the software I do must be gullible morons, it can't be that they have good reasons") with my own, honest anecdote, in a respectful tone. I know, I know, don't complain about DVs, but man HN, sometimes....

> HomeBrew has failed to have a package the fewest times of any I've used ...

Not that I doubt your claim but MacPorts has more packages than Homebrew:

Homebrew - around 6031 packages (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/)

MacPorts - 29,128 packages (https://ports.macports.org/)

(Ofcourse, more doesn't imply it has all the newer and / or popular packages or that Homebrew has the same packages as in MacPorts, which could explain your experience).

I had exactly the opposite experience. Homebrew chewed up my computer a couple times back when it installed everything alongside OS files. The only sane way to get rid of it was to reinstall the OS.

> back when it installed everything alongside OS files.

Whoa—I don't recall it ever doing that. Some time before ~2012?

Since the start Homebrew installed in /usr/local instead of a dedicated directory (which it now does); it literally always had a worse design than the earlier systems Fink and MacPorts. The only reason people used it is that it was written in Ruby and at the time there was a generation of new Rails developers that for some reason only wanted to use tools written in Ruby.

Not sure. It made the system binary folders user writable. It stopped doing that when Apple forced them by adding some extra security measures around /usr/bin.

Man, that blows. I find the current model (and only one I can remember? Maybe I did use it when it worked that way, and just didn't realize it) of keeping all user packages totally separate from the core system and just linking them in better and safer than what e.g. most Linux package managers do—now that I'm used to my package manager not really being able to mess up my base system, I wish all the rest worked that way, too :-/

I second that. MacPorts is amazing and makes the Mac a very decent Unix environment.

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