SSH mounts are done with osxfuse
MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp
This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.
You’d have to install macFUSE binary from their official site first, and load their kernel extension via the GUI, before running the Homebrew command to solve it.
Which begs the question: if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?
Jumping through hoops? It's installing a pkg file, takes about a minute and it is a one time operation you will never really need to do again.
Have you ever daily driven a linux box? Times have changed but you will jump through hoops far more often than on macOS.
- written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro
I daily drive macOS, Debian, and Windows (for personal & work purposes) - the same can be said for Linux (auto mounting a WebDAV share on boot), but at least:
- Linux’s documentation is much more comprehensive than Apple
- whatever you do on Linux some guy from 2003 would have already done so, whereas going from Catalina to Big Sur would’ve seen some big process changes and deprecations
- Intel vs M1 compatibility concerns galore, the only times I need to worry about that on Linux is when I run VMs and LXCs on Proxmox.
Ah, sure, but that was pre-systemd. Or maybe the solution was for XFree86 and now I'm on Wayland... Or an interesting incantation of ifconfig, which might not even be installed by default?
Typically I have to do it once a year, because the kernel extension seems to break with every new macOS version.
> - written from my frankenstein arch linux macbook pro
That depends entirely on what you're doing, what software and hardware you're using.
Any Linux distro on a MacBook (unless it's an old model)? Yeah, lots of hoops.
oh... oh you poor soul :P
I used to use Arch on a high end gaming laptop when I was younger and had time to waste on things like dotfiles and perfecting my vim config and jumping through hoops like Bonus level Sonic.
Now I opt for lovely simple boring functional Dell laptops from my employer and install Fedora on everything.
Out of Windows OSX and Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora/Sabayon (Gentoo variant), Fedora wins the "everything just works" thing by miles on the supported Dell HW and _still_ supports stuff better out of the box with my home desktop.
Yeah yeah I know everyone's experience is different, but...... Out of using all of the operating systems on the daily for 15 years, linux is the one I consistently begrudge the least.
I am a software engineer, but I work in user space and have zero interest in managing hardware issues. When I plug in a device to a Mac or Windows box it just works 95% of the time or more. I never have to touch textual config files, I never have to adjust DNS settings and routing settings to work with the VPN, when I plug in my headphones it plays audio through them, and my webcam works nicely. I don’t have to use the terminal to get my GPU to kick in at appropriate times.
I have tried to make the switch to Linux so many times, I love the computational model, but I’m too busy to spend my time working out the user experience, and too cheap to use a Mac now that WSL2 gives me a real Unix environment on Windows.
“Cheap, User Friendly, or Dev friendly, pick two” Was my mantra before WSL2 made windows dev friendly too… I’m not a fan boy for Windows, just too lazy to care anymore. I’d be happy to try Fedora…but I have my doubts…
I quit using Macs a long time ago because I find I have to spend way too much time configuring them and adapting to the workflow, but between Windows and Linux I find devices work pretty much the same. If anything Linux has a better success rate, things "just work." On Windows it seems like every single time I plug in a mouse Windows starts "installing drivers." Even though it has the drivers. Usually "installing drivers" seems like it's a nothing but sometimes it actually seems to be downloading things and installing them while the PnP mouse already should work.
Definitely, as a rule plugging things into Windows it can take 10-15 seconds to pick up while Linux works much faster on average.
For about 25 years. Hard to agree.
Agreed - again, from someone who has given a lot of thought to sshfs and mounting ssh/sftp on OSX.
See my reply to a sibling-of-your-parent, upthread: use Mountain Duck.
Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?
I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.
Ubuntu linux is a distribution, and only a very very small set of tools and functionalities is "Ubuntu", all the others are simply packaged up 3rd party tools
It's a big strength of Linux distributions. There is one central, easily reachable place where you can report and track bugs for pretty much everything you do on the computer.
Obviously there are no guarantees that things will be fixed (fast) if you don't pay some sort of support but that's fair enough and still, the maintainers usually want the stuff they package to work reasonably well (they wouldn't spend their time packaging it otherwise) so one can expect a minimum level of functionality for most things unless explicitly stated otherwise.
The supported area for Windows and macOS from Microsoft and Apple is small in comparison to BSD and GNU/Linux distributions and good luck reaching them anyway.
It's reasonable to have unfixed bugs for years if they are not really blocking many people (and even if they did, but that would be too bad). Maintainers are focusing on other things that need to be done (or not, anyway nobody is supposed to fix bugs for free if they don't want to).
In this case, launchpad works as intended, as a place were you can track the (non) progression of your bugs.
Me too, probably, by the way (in other projects). My bugs reports are more like FYIs to the community.
It's almost ;) as if Apple doesn't care if real UNIX people prefer their laptops anymore.
Apple has moved on, to a bigger and far less demanding market: "real" people who have never heard of the artist formerly known as UNIX.
I don't think any are. From a quick glance, everything should be included in Ubuntu's officially supported "main" section.
In my case I use sshfs, which also uses FUSE and is a "3rd party tool". Is that more reasonable than osxfuse? (Honest question, I'm unfamiliar with the latter)
edit:
sshfs is "unsupported": "However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker)."
Apparently this supports a bunch of other "virtual filesystems", like Google Drive, as well.
Since it's part of Gnome, I guess it's fair to compare this with MacOS and consider it "woking out of the box".
Only thing app that wasn't working well with gvfs was libreoffice. I don't know if it is still the case but it refused to handle a file gvfs mounted on my NAS regardless of the protocol (ssh, smb, nfs).
..and MacOS lets you mount an nfs share ootb as a user. On linux you need an fstab entry for that though that is really not an issue at all.
How you ask? You do this with the mac specific command: mount_nfs Here is how I use it to mount shares from my NAS. $ mount_nfs -o nolocks,nfsvers=3 /home/nas/myshares/nfs /Users/bob/nas/nfs
mount -t nfs ...
This seems like a reasonable complaint.
It's not that there are no solutions, it's that the author and as a matter of fact I too resent that we have to look for solutions.
From my point of view when I plug my phone in my linux box it just works but when I plug it in my Mac nothing happens, thus MacOs is an inferior operating system. As in it fails to operate in the manner I would like it to.
You can always disable SIP and load unsigned kernel extensions, if they refuse to sign.
If you’re a power user, you’ve probably already disabled SIP.
A couple of releases ago files like /etc/hosts and /etc/sudoers were protected by SIP. That’s not the case anymore, though.
And if you’re deliberately installing unsigned drivers, the assumption should be that you (should) know what you’re doing. So disabling Secure Boot/SIP as a prerequisite for that is fine.
Or are you suggesting that everyone should be able to install unsigned drivers with 2 clicks? Because I’m not convinced that it’s a good idea.
Actually I am ("signing" with one CA only is mostly security theater and market control), but that's besides the point. The point being that macfuse will quickly become even more of a pain to install and use, making it more useless and not recommendable to end users.
Please don't go around another time and now claim "but you can disable SIP!" while at the same time claiming "but end users should not disable SIP!". We are effectively an end user here. If you "need to know what you are doing" to install macfuse then no one is going to install it.
It's exactly the same as with Secure Boot. No one wants the Scary Boot Prompts. No one wants the Scary Desktop Watermark. Your users will blame your product and avoid it.
If you could just whitelist one extra signature, then maybe there'd be something to discuss. But you can't.
I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.
There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.
This comes from [1] which is an interesting page.
It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately).
Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither.
Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.
You can mount an iPhone as MTP. But only for pictures, not for music.
I kinda get why, but blah. It’s a bit of a weird distinction to me.
This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS.
MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default.
That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…
[1] https://www.usb.org/document-library/media-transfer-protocol...
I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.
(2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
(2) Many people really only use any computer as a consumption device, but the general ding of iOS as "read only" has always rung hollow to me. A large number of people work primarily with text -- emails, posts, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. An iPad with a keyboard is a GREAT tool for them, and that's not a "read only" use case.
As an aside, when I last updated my camera kit I added an iPad Pro to use for photo processing and culling when traveling instead of a laptop. It's actually GREAT for that, too, but this level of power is relatively new to the platform.
I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.
Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.
Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?
Comparing a stock Mac OS to a Linux distribution with packages installed is pretty shady.
Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.
I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.
On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...
MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%.
Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately).
82,719 responses on the operating system question too...
(I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)
I think a lot of this will happen under the goal of unifying the laptop and phone/tablet experience.
> Mount an SSH or NFS drive
I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer.
As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this.
Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.