My latest woe is getting newsboat to refresh my rss feeds either as a cronjob or launchd service. On my mojave machine this was as trivial as it sounds, either a single line in crontab or a single line with some window dressing to make it into a launchd plist file then its OK. I try and do this now and it doesn’t work, since it appears newsboat runs and pulls changes but is unable to actually write changes to the cache database now.
I have gone down the rabbit hole now of giving full disk access to the shell, cron, launchd, launchctl, and the newsboat binary, but no dice. I can’t get it to work and I can’t find anything about why this shouldn’t work other than permitting full disk access. Even then that shouldn’t be required because the cache.db file sits in the users home directory.
On Linux, I plugged in the 4k and everything is tiny tiny tiny. I tried to make it a little bigger, and some stuff grows, other stuff doesn't, and some stuff just broke. Then in the end I was sort of stuck in this weird frankenstein of settings that looked like crap on any monitor. Like I said, this was over 3 years ago and the Linux install was very old at that point (I think it was a Linux Mint based on 18.04 at the latest, possibly even 16.04 still).
Mac has a slider that changes the scaling of everything, smoothly and all at once.
I probably should have just gotten a bigger 4k
KDE will have working fractional scaling for the DE and apps using QT and there you can adjust a slider to a % you like.
Integer scaling is silly for me: it's either huge or tiny.
Yes, KDE does it better and with Wayland you can also do fractional scaling. But the original point stands: it sucks on (most) linux and works flawlessly on Mac.
Windows/Android also use the superior direct render approach. The reason you always heard about Windows having horrible scaling was due to legacy Windows apps not having an understanding of how to use scaling, the actual scaling approach itself is very good (and most all apps still getting updates should be good by now).
Not really, if you have a discerning eye.
Any non-integer resolution on macOS is rendered at twice that resolution, and then raster-scaled down and anti-aliased. So, if you have MacBook with a 2560×1400 display and you select any other resolution besides that and 1280×800 (exactly half), the desktop render will be raster scaled.
To be fair, it works better than Wayland's previous behaviour because of the 2× rendering factor, but you can absolutely still see scaling artifacts if you look for them, and I certainly do. Ringing around text in a dark-mode editor is especially obvious.
The only OS that has gotten HiDPI right is Windows.
I deal with these things daily using a Thinkpad with a display that requires 1.5x scaling to be usable. Can’t wait for these issues to be solved and for the asterisks to disappear.
Yea, GTK4 to my knowledge until now doesn't support fractional scaling, but the new™ ngl and vulkan renderers should be able to do fractional scaling. If it's actually hooked up to do so is another question.
By contrast I have never been able to use Linux successfully as a desktop OS because there is a dearth of polished commercial apps, and the HW compatibility has always been iffy. MacOS generally works out of the box with the HW, and the apps are generally highly polished.
I caveat the apps as “generally” because there are some turds for sure. iTunes and now Music have always been horrible, and somehow they managed to make Music even worse than iTunes.
Historically Macs do benefit from 3rd party software (see also Alfred), over time the best of it seems to eventually get baked into the OS. I don’t see that as a downside really.
I have found more recently that I can get something reasonable (for me) set up, although I'm confident I'll always need a Mac nearby to do some things on.
I didn't really run into this as an issue at all. Then again, "commercial apps" sounds largely like a relic of the 90's. It has Slack and Teams and Spotify and can run most games thanks to Valve.
Biggest thing I ran into was that MS Word is too buggy to 100% reliably read anything created in alternate programs. I know it's Word and not LibreOffice or anything because it happens between different versions of Word too.
In the olden days it was having a decent unix comand line environment. Windows didn't, osx and linux did, and many of us switched. For others it's a good Adobe suite experience. For others it will be Excel and Office etc.
I totally sympathise with parent and Apple Music starting up every damn time the play button is pressed without a media app already started. That's a button I used to press a lot, and at some point I stopped playing music on the mac altogether.
The move to kill kernel extension nullified a lot of the historical advantage of the mac: many stuff that was changing low level behavior became a lot more unreliable . Having keyboard remappings get stuck or unresponsive for instance is a huge QOL degradation.
I cannot imagine how this matches at all to anyone's workflow. Nobody at apple works on a single project across multiple applications (documentation in browswr, your IDE, an emulator, some terminals, etc.).?
You have to install a specific app and give it some crazy permissions to fix those issues. Pfft
> Solutions? Wait for Apple to fix it (or write a wonky script to fix it on boot, which I did). Eventually they did, but ug.
Writing a wonky script to fix something on boot sounds eerily like my Linux experiences.
> to support using 3 finger clicks as middle-click I had to buy software. On Windows this is just built in. On Linux it's on by default.
This could also be phrased as "in some ways macOS works differently to Windows and Linux. However, there is a solution for those who prefer the Linux way."
> to make Spotify work somewhat properly I had to download separate software...
That's Spotify, not macOS.
> if I open Spotify and hit the Play button on my keyboard, Apple Music opens
Yes, Apple Music opening for inexplicable reasons is very annoying.
> it took me a LONG time to figure out how to set Excel to open CSVs instead of Apple's Numbers app
That's just not understanding how macOS works. A 10-second web search would have ended your suffering.
> The Apple calendar app alerts me whenever I create an event in another app (Outlook, Google, whatever).
That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable to me.
No one will disagree.
OP would be a bit more specific, and say "worse."
Still, it's annoying when you search for how to do something in OS X and the first few threads are full of people saying "that isn't how it works! Instead of wanting to change it, you need to understand and follow the Apple Way™!" You're usually able to find the solution after a bit more searching, but the Apple Forums are especially bad.
Autosave also has versioning. You can always go back through the auto save history. You can also revert to the original opened file. This is done from the file menu.
Also, if like a good mac user you have Time Machine configured and on, you can browse your versions further into the past.
Heavy iWork user, I don’t know about Xcode though.
Being mad at software for operating in a different paradigm than you are used to is not productive. This all applies just as much to users coming to macOS from Windows (or imitations thereof) to macOS as it does to users coming to git from svn.
Thus, all progress is made by unreasonable men. (Paraphrased)
> Being mad at software for operating in a different paradigm than you are used to is not productive.
Indeed, it is often the ONLY thing that causes progress.
What most people on this thread are asking for is to be given the ability to mold/configure things that most other non-Apple apps provide. It's a well known trope to have the Apple culture say "You are wrong, do it this other way instead" rather than "here's how you get what you want".
> Being mad at software for operating in a different paradigm than you are used to is not productive. This all applies just as much to users coming to macOS from Windows (or imitations thereof) to macOS as it does to users coming to git from svn.
I guess I can see how you intended your comment to mean what you're saying, but reading these two comments in sequence I think one can understand my confusion. You may wish to directly say what you mean, rather than speak in glib generalities.
And I'll bet you you can't bind xkill to Ctrl-Alt-Esc, and your cursor turns into a little skull-and-crossbones, and whatever you click immediately vaporizes via a SIGKILL, on a Mac. :p
Anyway, keybindings are certainly changeable if you're ready to dive into a hundred distinct projects each defining their own key handling. There's no truly system wide way to alter system keybindings in any meaningful sense.
For example, I use Super for tiling window management, launching programs, and other things. On macOS, with Yabai and skhd, you can't use plain Cmd to do that.
Overloading Ctrl has downsides, but I think it is a net benefit overall.
Anyway, you can use cmd, you just need to have an actual command (non-modifier-key) to pass it—I have no use for a key that does one thing.
Currently I think KDE is the least-bad option, as common shortcuts can be remapped globally, but it could be a lot better — Qt can universally remap ‘Control’ shortcuts to the GUI key, but it's only available on Mac builds.
The hardware is amazing. The battery life is astounding.
The software, in almost every area, is inferior to my experience in Linux. The Apple parts generally worst of all (only Microsoft Office on it is worse). In the end, I'm probably 70% as efficient on macOS as I was on Linux after 3 years of using it.
The one thing macOS did better than my Linux box, hands-down, was supporting a 4k monitor. My Linux install was a little long in the tooth, though, so hopefully it's gotten better?
I really look forward to using Asahi when/if it's ready. I'd love to go back to Linux.
Example gripes:
- macOS offers this great feature that announces the time every half hour (or whatever you set it to). For a year, after a major OS update, it just didn't work after reboot unless you went in and changed it. Solutions? Wait for Apple to fix it (or write a wonky script to fix it on boot, which I did). Eventually they did, but ug.
- to support using 3 finger clicks as middle-click I had to buy software. On Windows this is just built in. On Linux it's on by default.
- to make Spotify work somewhat properly I had to download separate software (BeardSpice). After 3 years, I forget what that actually does
- if I open Spotify and hit the Play button on my keyboard, Apple Music opens. (Once I actually play Spotify it fixes it, though)
- it took me a LONG time to figure out how to set Excel to open CSVs instead of Apple's Numbers app
- The Apple calendar app alerts me whenever I create an event in another app (Outlook, Google, whatever). Like I got invited. To an event I created. It didn't used to do that...