I think where macOS shines is it's standardization of things beyond the unix terminal.

(I'm also a big fan of the hardware. 2019 macbook has been the best laptop I've owned so far)

In terms of fighting the OS, I don't know where that comes from.

Anything cli you generally use sudo, anything else you open the security settings and tick some boxes. I don't even have to type my password, I just touch the finger print reader. Then the program works forever. (I have a keybinding to open security settings too, so it only takes maybe 5 seconds most of the time)

I honestly don't know what people are fighting, unless they just really hate clicking through a few menus.

One key piece of advice I follow is NEVER update to the latest new OS version. Almost every person I know does and they run into crazy issues that shouldn't even be problems. I'm not going to be your free QA engineer, Apple.

Would you call tethering your Android phone via USB to your laptop a basic thing? Recently, I was having trouble with my phone's WiFi hotspot and tried to tether via USB. The only solution was Horndis, a 3rd party kernel extension. I quickly became knowledgeable about kexts and csrutil, rebuilt a kernel extension for M1 architecture and gave up after several hours of frustration. It's ridiculous that Apple can get away with being so closed

That’s not an Apple problem, that’s an Android problem. The ball is in Google’s court there.

How so? It works fine on Linux, and I hear it works fine on Windows too (I think you might have to install a driver there though). Apple seems to have the odd OS out here, why is it no their fault?

My assumption here is that, as usual, Apple doesn't care about anyone who hasn't fully bought into their ecosystem. If it's not an iDevice, they don't care if it works fully with their desktop OS.

you can just use adb to forward a socks proxy through your phone. not sure why you would need a kext

If a Linux user suggested that, they'd be laughed out of the room. "Yeah, just use this semi-obscure command line tool to forward a port, then set your system to proxy through it" is a technically workable solution, but poor UX.

Exactly! I keep seeing this shit about how you have to fuck around with all these config files in Linux... Then when you have to do the same trash for basic things in OSX, nobody blinks an eye.

Or maybe it's ridiculous that Google leaves this "basic feature" to Horndis and doesn't make a nice way to do it themselves. Which is telling on how "basic" this feature is and how many people actually use it in the real world. I wouldn't call it a basic thing.

I've been using Debian almost-exclusively since 2001. A new job requires that I work on MacOS, which has been fun.

The primary things that I am struggling with are the keybindings and loss of true fluxbox sloppy focus. zsh and the BSD tools take a little getting used to (different ps, grep, sed, etc?), but are quite serviceable.

But lordy, do I wish I could hit windows-A at any time and instantly get a new terminal, as I've been doing for twenty years. How do y'all Mac people live? ;).

Yeah the different keyboard shortcuts are annoying. Though I have the opposite perspective, and macOS’ feel much more natural.

That said, on macOS there is a preference pane in which you can rebind almost all shortcuts, and add shortcuts for things that don’t have them, and it works OS-wide without fuss. In particular you can add shortcuts to services (which is something you probably want to look into), and you can set Automator workflows as services. I haven’t seen anything quite like that on Linux.

I do love that the command-key allows terminal copy/paste without overloading Ctrl-C (and was overjoyed when I center-clicked by reflex and the Terminal did the right thing :))

> wish I could hit windows-A at any time and instantly get a new terminal

You can create your own macOS native workflows with Automator and launch them with macOS keyboard shortcuts. It's all built right in.

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch002051.htm

Will that override command-A for select-all? (which would be ctrl-A on most other platforms) Looks like maybe-not, through redirects?

It would override command+A for select all.

You could rebind select if you wanted, I wouldn't really suggest doing that though. The command key sends the same key-code as the windows key, but it's not on the same place on the keyboard.

If you're on a Mac keyboard, the muscle memory should map to Option+a. Which by default types å.

If you're using a PC keyboard with your Mac, and you're not already used to it… you might want to look at 'System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys...' so that your setup either:

1. Puts the modifier keys where they are on Mac keyboards, by setting Option->Command, and Command->Option.

2. Puts most shortcuts where they are on PC keyboards, by setting Control->Command.