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0 pointstomxor7y ago0 comments

A lot of the GNU userland used in macOS is _ancient_ I think this is partly due to new GPL3 incompat? Then the BSD userland is _also_ ancient... for no apparent reason... Then there is no native package manager, so you have to use stuff like brew - which kinda sorta works but doesn't really feel anywhere near as consistent, integrated and up do date as basically _any_ linux package manger.

Then there's MacOS itself... which is just getting more annoying, I quit after 10.6 (which was best version IMO), everytime I use a mac now I compare it to the relative simplicity and stability of this version, and it's just so much worse. I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this.

That said, for non developers I'd still recommend a mac over windows, although in recent years it's gone down hill, and personally I don't want to trade my freedom for closed source OS that have their own agenda - I understand that most users don't have the luxury of really being able to use anything not as friendly to basic users.

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kyriakos7y ago

on the other hand some of the problems you mentioned were solved on Windows with WSL.

tomxorOP7y ago

WSL is not a good solution from what i've seen, most of it's proponents have never used Linux on real hardware and are comparing it to gitbash for windows or whatever, or have never used linux before. Some things run fine, others are insanely slow due to either slow translation layer or simply because the behaviour of the underlying windows kernel actually is really many times slower than linux, e.g forking - I didn't know this, just found out first hand. The file-system integration is a bag of shit - the common issue being trying to use git in linux while editing files from a GUI in windows will cause frequent explosions, failed fs updates to to arbitrary windows locking are not fed back to linux which really fucks with git. (i'm talking about using the linux fs from windows which is the way with the least issues - doing the reverse has even more severe consequences). Also the terminal app is the worst i've ever seen. FYI I'm talking from experience helping my colleagues who use windows. </rant>

IMO, if you must use windows and need linux/gnu stuff, just stick linux in a VM with a full GUI, it may seem more resource intensive running a whole other kernel and GUI, but it will work reliably without horrible surprises.

lylecubed7y ago

> Then there is no native package manager

Isn't brew native? This time around (a few months ago) I didn't notice any issues with setting up a modern frontend dev environment. Not even the dependency hell I always seem to run into on Linux for modern web dev stuff.

> I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this.

I've been using macs off and on since I owned a titanium powerbook G4 that ran Tiger (10.4). I've been doing web development during that entire time as well.

Most recently, I got a mac mini with High Sierra installed. I've only been using it for a few months and I'm seriously considering moving back to my WSL setup. I originally moved away from my WSL setup because, about once a month, it would corrupt my git repo and I'd have to wipe it. That wasn't nearly as much hassle as I'm dealing with on a daily basis on the mac mini.

My gripes, in short: Fullscreen mode is an abomination, network drives no longer work worth a damn, APFS defaults to case insensitive, my wifi stops working randomly until I turn it off and on again, ditto with the audio, Finder favorites disappear at random and the keyboard modifiers reset themselves at random.

When I configure something on Windows it damned well stays configured. I used to be able to say the same about OS X but apparently those days are behind me.

It's not all bad, though. The Mac App ecosystem is still the best I've ever encountered. I'll happily pay what Mac apps cost because they still run like a swiss watch. Unfortunately, none of those apps are necessary for web development work.

Hemospectrum7y ago

> Isn't brew native?

It's third-party. Tailor-made for MacOS, but not included with the Apple developer tools.

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