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Comment by nottheengineer | Hacker News Reader

"My software crashes so often that it's worth the time to automate restarting it" is what I'd expect of a windows user. Has macOS really gotten that bad over the last few years? I remember being forced to use it a long time ago and while it was very limited and special, nothing ever crashed or was visibly buggy.

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100% of crashes on my M1 MBA occur in applications when accessing files over SMB network shares. One every couple of days. I have to restart about once every week or two because it borks the system completely.

But when I'm not connected to an SMB drive, I don't think I've had a single crash in years.

I have no idea if it's something in the SMB driver itself that's crashing, or assumptions inside of application logic that fail in certain SMB scenarios.

SMB really is hell. I write business software and our admins do what they can to avoid using it because it's very hard to know when it fails.

But from a dev perspective, that's probably a driver level issue because that's where you want to handle or propagate errors instead of crashing.

It’s faulty app logic, assuming an io error cannot occur accessing a filesystem. They’ll also crash if you have disk issues or driver problems. The important thing is they may not even realize they’re calling into a function or routine that can access the fs for something!

All io access needs to be recoverable or catchable for your app not to crash. You’d be surprised how much background fs activity there can be in apps (or indirectly triggered by apps!) all the time.

That and sandboxing effects with perhaps improperly accessed bookmark data

I'm building a macos app now, and only because I wasn't catching fs access error did I realize I needed to handle folder access carefully when using bookmarks in core data.

I swear _Finder_ has this bug if you plug in a superannuated external HDD.

This is one reason where I think Rust shines, and has even improved how I write C++.

So many areas where rust makes me deal with a result or option that are easy to take for granted. It’s a strong reminder of the number of things we should be treating as possible error cases

It makes you do something, but if the consumer just does .unwrap() the end result is going to be the same.

Sure, but a developer can also write any number of other code that’s irresponsible. At that point the language has done all it can for them, and the onus is on the developer to not be lazy.

And when the crash happens, it’s obvious why

Stuff like this with NFS was my living nightmare for years. On Linux it would put processes into the D state and you'd have to restart the entire machine to fix anything.

Why is the assumption the OS is the fault and not the app doing something it shouldn't be doing so the system slaps it? If the OS was at fault, would not the OS be crashing rather than the app. To me, it sounds like the OS is working nicely with a misbehaving app.

Maybe the better question would be if the OS SDK is to a state that doing naughty things is easier to do, but again, that's not the OS

I’m not going to get into the Mac vs Windows flamewar but I worked at a place with this infuriating attitude about crashes. Our (desktop) application crashed so much that customers were complaining. Instead of, you know, fixing the crashes, the tech lead declared that we would instead build a “launcher” app that just sat in the background and restarted the application every time it crashed. Horrible “crashes are inevitable and hard to fix!” attitude. Talk about a morale killer.

>"My software crashes so often that it's worth the time to automate restarting it" is what I'd expect of a windows user.

This is insulting even for windows users.

That's why I flagged it.

Yes, but it’s also funny, and not mean-spirited or targeted at a specific person. Windows users are in no way a protected class.

No, it's just targeting a specific group of people with false facts, while not being remotely funny, unless your choice of humor revolves around shitting on users for their OS choice, aka petty tribalism.

Humor is more complex to get right, it needs some punchline or an arc within the context where your initial expectations are subverted, in order to be funny, not just "windows users are like X".

Hold up there, joke police. Petty tribalism is actually funny. It’s gross tribalism which goes too far.

Listen to Garrison Keillor’s old radio shows, and amidst the long story arcs are little tribalist jokes between the Christian denominations (and Unitarians?), and among the different peoples of Scandanavia. Like this one, the jokes rely on the implicit context inflating the difference between people on the basis of tribalism. And being a part of the subculture, the audience all knows this.

The same is true in sports comedy, and sports is nothing if not petty tribalism. And while you may not actually have to be a masochist to be a Mets fan… wait, bad example. Anyways exaggerated differences based on self-assigned fandoms is how this all works. Just like operating systems.

An OS is a tool, not a sports team. And that supposed joke was not funny no matter how you try to slice it.

It's as funny as calling Mac users Sheeple.

I hate to break it to you, but I think you don’t have a good sense of humor. This is fine, everyone is different and that’s okay.

Minor teasing is a part of the theory of humor, as proposed by Immanuel Kant. I don’t purport to go all the way on superiority theory, but insult comedy is a part of comedy nonetheless. I personally dislike it but I do recognize it as humor.

Incidentally regarding the part of my previous comment that’s a joke: the joke is not the insult. The joke is a surprise theory one, that I was going to make a statement about sports, but at the last minute I reversed by pretending the example was true. The butt of the joke is myself, talking myself out of a coherent point.

Of course by analyzing it you ruin it for most people, but there we are.

You do realize that what you personally defined as "humor and teasing" against a broad userbase is against HN guidelines, right, which is why it got flagged?

Also, something being humorous requires it to be funny and get people laugh, but I don't think many are laughing as making fun of Windows users jokes have been stale since the days of Windows Vista, Mac VS PC ads were the rage, and Steve Jobs still had a pulse.

If that canned joke still makes you laugh in 2023, maybe your sense of humor is bad.

If you don't know why the app is crashing, then you don't know enough to blame the OS or the ecosystem. That's true of any operating system. Apps aren't magically crash free because they're on a Mac. Dereferencing an invalid pointer can still segfault you just as quickly.

Which OS do you use? It sounds like it can't be Linux! Looking forward to hearing about this crash-free nirvana.

The only app that has been crashing or freeze, on my Fedora box these last few years is a Microsoft app: Edge.

Arch. My PC sometimes hangs for no reason, which it also did with windows. It used to be a non-issue because it was too loud to run it overnight, but now it's quiet so I'm trying to figure that out. Every nvidia driver update has about a 10% chance to break something. That was also the case on windows so I just didn't update it there and had great success with recommending people to find a version that works and never touching it again.

I don't recall ever having an issue that was fixed by restarting an application though. If it doesn't work, I read the error message to figure out why it doesn't work and fix that. No "just try again, it might work this time" like on windows, which I enjoy.

MacOS applications are just like applications on any other platform. Why the juvenile Windows bashing?

No they're not, otherwise we'd use those other platforms.

I use Windows.

I also use Windows... for gaming once a week, because it provides a passable experience using my crap PC hardware. I use a mac for everything else because it lets me get work done without being distracted by how poorly text is rendered, how dated some of the icons and interfaces are, or by the fear that I'll need to re-install the operating system once in a while. For me, my Windows pc is my Chromebook with a gpu, for others, it's their primary.

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