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Comment by VHRanger | Hacker News Reader

You forgot the lovely thing that is .DS_Store, which ends up everywhere your machine visits on the network.

Apple has a silly default enabled that causes that issue—the best thing is to disable it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102064

Silly defaults are why I got rid of my Macbook. I just can't tread the water.

Put on your headphones... Apple Music launches. Save files to a certain directory, and it's a tacit request to put it in iCloud. Mouse acceleration is default, disabling it is as easy as a terminal command though (or a third-party tweaking tool). Safari will send nag notifications, but only if you don't disable it. Leaving iCloud alone will add a bright red (1) balloon to your Settings app for no reason; probably for the best. Disable Crash Reporter, disable telemetry, disable the program terminator, disable the sleep image, disable OCSP and Gatekeeper... on top of all that, I still disable automatic updates since Apple cannot be trusted to maintain basic functionality between minor updates.

In all my time on MacOS, the only piece of compelling software I found was iTerm2. Which is a shame, since I don't use MacOS for terminal stuff besides SSH anyways.

Boy if iCloud defaults annoy you, wait until you see recent versions of Windows.

By default they put your entire desktop folder, documents folder, etc. as children folders of the OneDrive folder now.

It's absolutely infuriating

Yep - I dropped Windows 10 like the hot garbage it was. I suffered through Windows 8 expecting that things might turn around, and even on the insider builds it consistently felt like Windows was an ad delivery platform. I was disappointed to watch Apple fumble their opportunity to make OSX the true Windows-killer.

Now that I daily-drive Linux, I don't log-on to Windows or Mac systems without a deposit for the troubles. I truly feel bad looking out at the modern landscape of mainstream operating systems. It's no wonder most people feel trapped by modern technology.

That’s a feature, though. My parents, our CEo, etc. never lose a file. And if they get a new device everything just shows up on the new device. It’s sort of magical, actually.

Resource forks are worse than that. Any non-Apple filesystem you work on gets littered with ._ files and archives get __MACOSX folders too. Mac OS leave a lot of detritus in its wake.

Apple's equivalent of the "sent from my Blackberry" email signatures of yore.

You forgot the lovely thing that is .DS_Store, which ends up everywhere your machine visits on the network.

No worse than Windows spewing thumbs.db files all over the place. Or any of the thousands of different dot files that end up in Linux volumes.

i must have missed the part of nautilus or dolphin where they put a dot file in every directory you navigate to.

Does Windows still make that file? I built a new PC a few years ago and don't recall disabling it (Win10).

I think it’s only present if Explorer needs to store a preview for a folder or file.

They're gone since Vista (2007), I think. Widows now stores thumbnails in the user profile folder. But the stigma lives on.

dotfiles live in your home directory almost exclusively.

Literally there’s no tooling I know of that will drop random hidden files.

The ext4 filesystem does have a special hidden directory for data partially recovered/corrupted

On that note, ZFS has a hidden ".zfs" directory for accessing filesystem snapshots.

That works with ZFS shared over the network (samba, etc) too, which can be useful. :)

I quite literally do not know a single filesystem that creates dotfiles outside of the volume root directory, besides APFS. It is both worse and unique relative to modern operating systems.

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