Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

2 of these 3 things, I have done multiple times on a Mac. Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS and has been for nearly a decade. Mounting SSH is supported by 3rd-party tools, yes, but they're the same cross-platform 3rd-party tool you'd use in Linux... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac and is not installed by default in most Linux distributions (although fair enough it's installed by default on Ubuntu).

The only thing I wasn't familiar with is MTP, which is apparently a Windows-specific protocol that Microsoft forced into the USB standard in later versions, and as far as I know across decades of using Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS across multiple computers on the same network with shared peripherals I've never even used this protocol.

What's the complaint again?

OS choice is mostly a personal preference. As far as I am personally concerned, FreeBSD is the best OS possible to use, and macOS is second best. But I don't write blog posts telling people that their preference is incapable of doing things my preference is capable of doing, and if I were to do so, I'd at least do my research first to make sure it was correct.

" ... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac ..."

I've given a lot of thought to ssh/sftp mount points (for obvious reasons) and the standard recipe (and support answer) at rsync.net has been FUSE/sshfs.

I've even written a handful of scripts and one-liners to support my personal use of sshfs on my own machines, etc.

But lately ... I've just switched to using "Mountain Duck" which does everything I want and is quick and easy and slick and professional.

I forget what the license cost is, but it's worth it. The "official" FUSE for OSX and sshfs packages were getting old and came from odd sources (sshfs for mac is from 2014) and I don't think you can 'brew install' them, etc.

Mountain Duck.

You can install sshfs via brew, but it works a lot better if you just download the package manually.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend using sshfs on Mac. I used it for about a year, and about 90% of the time it worked great. The rest of the time it would hang, just not sync, not let me write files, etc. and every couple of weeks it would break so badly that a restart was the only fix, usually at the most inopportune times.

I ended up just grabbing an old external hard drive and installing syncthing. The remote server still has all the RAID and backups and whatnot, but now I basically have a local cache on the old hard drive, so it works consistently and is fast. If it breaks, oh well, I'll get another one and sync it again.

I remember at some point it would hang and becomes very difficult to remount after that. There was an issue that has a work around but wasn’t fixed by the time I give it up.

I created an HN account just to second this comment. I still can’t understand the thought processes that goes into similar blogs that like to trash one OS for another or another.

If you like something, awesome! But making something else look bad because you didn’t like it does not make your thing any better.

The article uses the phrase “objective fact” in the introduction which, to me, is a huge red flag, and it ultimately served as an accurate predictor of what was to follow. There are plenty of things to criticize in macOS, but the complaints in this piece were inane, inaccurate or overwhelmingly nit-picky.

MTP is used by basically every single Android phone and tablet. It's also used by some other devices like MP3 players. Because of the first point it's actually extremely widespread...

and garmin watches (wonder if they have android beneath the covers?)

Garmin watches apparently are Linux-based but with Qt UI. It doesn't look like they directly use Android/WearOS (or the SDK would be Java or a compatible language), but likely they re-use many of the same lower level Linux features.

> Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS

In the version I was using, mount-readonly yes, mount-readwrite no. Had to install Mounty for readwrite.

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