The experience is - in one word - disgusting. It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings. It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator. ( Yes Windows lacks is too). unavailability of a great package manager - all of us knows it, homebrew or macports doesn't cut it - makes me vomit. Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing , "Which key should I use for this? Apple or Option? How can I skip to end of line? Why I'm at end of file now?" Also some desktop choices are not ok for my liking; switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate? So many details.
Most of the time I can't help myself to stop restarting into Linux. I get slower and distracted. I have to install Mozilla Stack (Thunderbird and Firefox).
This may be only me but, I hate OsX. And I'm not starting on the "wanna be walled garden-ness."
makes me vomit. -- visit your local physician.
Unfamiliar key bindings -- "Unfamiliar" by definition = "I don't know it" which isn't the OS's problem. You've gotta admit Command-C for copy being different than Control-C is brilliant.
switching to full height windows -- it's not a maximize button, it's an "optimal size" button. If your content is 500px wide, you don't need a 1000px wide window full of white space.
may be only me -- I'm pretty sure it is (check their stock).
You're so close! Just put some respect in this and it'd be one of the best refutations i've seen on HN in ages.
unfamiliar key bindings, look for any other keyboard except OsX ones and show me the apple or the option or the command keys then I will back.
For the "Optimal Size button", the underlying operation does not account for the contents width, it only accounts for the desktop height.
The world is not running on OsX or Apple hardware. They have a decent userbase but not the whole computer users are using one.
Not sure what you mean by common denominator shortcuts, but if you mean things like Quit/Cut/Paste/Print/Save/New/Undo then you're dead wrong. Exists, and largely unchanged for nearly 30 years. And they're highly consistent. If it's a menu command, it's the command key.
Mac OS X does not lack a decent terminal emulator. You might have missed it, the program is called Terminal.
You might be right about the package managers, but many people would disagree with you.
There is no maximize button.
You installed Firefox and Thunderbird, so what's the problem? Are you trolling now?
I'm sorry but I can't think of Terminal as a decent Terminal emulator.
Not having a maximize button invalidates my criticism but brings another one of unfamiliar titlebar choices.
I'm not trolling, I'm speaking of defaults.
Not allowing the user to add this functionality (even if it's a hidden option in a config file somewhere) is sub optimal in my opinion.
There are some great things about OSX but there are a few small but frustrating things too.
On shortcuts: you're just used to another way, it's not the system's fault. It's possible to use both Windows and OSX without much difficulty after getting used to it.
At least 50% of the joy of using a mac is due to the hardware and integration.
1) The lack of packages combined with lack of quality of the packages (e.g. they do not build or have a poor defaults).
2) That homebrew installs stuff under /usr/local as owned by your user. That does not meet the expectations of UNIX applications and seems to me like it could be unsafe due to messing with expectations. Stuff under /usr/local/bin is supposed to be owned by root:root.
The good part of homebrew is that writing homebrew scripts seems easier than writing dpkg or rpm scripts.
Really?
It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings
No it doesn't. Emacs/bash key combos are everywhere. These are the oldest and most important key sequences in use on any computer. CTRL-A, CTRL-E, META-F, META-B, META-D, CTRL-K - and they pervade the Cocoa/Nextstep text engine. They're everywhere.
It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator
Really? Terminal is pretty awesome in some ways. For example, with the Gnome terminal app, when you resize the window, lines aren't readjusted for width and you end up either cropping lines or leaving a blank space to the right. Terminal seems to be one of the few terminal emulators that gets this right.
Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing
I don't understand this. Doesn't this just mean that you haven't gotten used to it?
How can I skip to end of line?
CTRL-E, like I said. If you're an Emacs nut (and I am) you can even edit the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to make these key bindings work in ANY text field that uses an NSTextField object in ANY OSX application.
There's even a global kill-ring. It's awesome. Clearly there were some real Emacs fans who worked on the original Nextstep text engine.
switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate
It's a 'resize' button, not a maximize button. For many applications, especially those whose content is a fixed or maximum size (like web browsers), a maximize button with a large screen is just silly - you'd waste screen real estate with white or blank borders. What the 'resize' button does is and should be application-specific. For a web browser, it should resize the window to the size of the content. Ditto a word processor. For an IDE like XCode and Eclipse, it should maximize (and both of those do).
This may be only me but, I hate OsX
It sounds to me like you haven't put much energy into figuring it out and finding the best workflow - certainly not nearly as much energy as I've put into learning the esoterica behind Linux abominations like XKB and Gnome 3. And I would never say that Linux disgusts me - far from it. I think Linux is great.
Do you only play free games, listen to free music and read free books? What about the electronics you use, the architecture of the buildings you live in and the car you drive?
If you sell me something, you cannot tell me that I can't modify it for my own use, for example. You as the seller can't tell me that I'm not allowed to resell my textbooks, or to modify the frames on my eyeglasses, or to hire my friend to fix my vacuum cleaner.
Proprietary software licenses do do that - the main difference is that is a non-rivalrous good; I can redistribute software without losing access to it myself. Because of that, people think it's somehow 'wrong' to say that I should be allowed to purchase a program and then resell it to another person, but if you look at it the other way, that's no more 'wrong' than purchasing a physical good and then reselling it.
In the South, it used to be common to sell property on the condition that the purchaser never sell it to a black person (I think they still used the term Negro or 'colored' then). If I remember correctly, that was first deemed illegal in certain parts not because it's horribly racist, but because it violates the principles of first sale: you've sold me something, and now you can't tell me what I'm not allowed to do with it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-roberts/books-were-the-fi...
That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals).
Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
IMO, the Command key is one of the best features of a Mac.
But then I was on text-mode Linux (and before that, text-mode Unix) for many years. I would understand if someone used to Windows did not like it.
But control-c should not kill your session, only the currently running process. Control-d is what kills sessions. If you have no current foreground process the shell just starts a new input line. Still could be real bad obviously if a process is killed.
Don't get me wrong, I am not against specific boundaries for keeping people from doing potentially unwanted actions. But at some point, all the technical solutions to human errors are like sudo.
The nice thing about Linux is that I can at least remap these keybindings. On OS X, it's literally impossible to do a perfect remapping of the keys (trust me. I've tried.)
Hopefully I've saved recently (or run the process inside GNU screen....).
My experience was pretty hit or miss, and mostly I ended up with an mismash of semi-random keybindings which is sort of the opposite of what I was shooting for. On the Mac developers have done a remarkably good job of adhering to a consistent set of shortcuts (down to things like Command-, for preferences).
The other issue is that most apps don't make it straightforward to bulk re-assign keybindings from Control to Super, and last I checked it was impossible to turn off menu accelerators for Gtk+ based apps (e.g., Alt+F to bring up the file menu in Firefox).
Most of the time what I want is to map Command->Super and Option->Meta, and have Super replace Control in all GUI app keyboard shortcuts leaving Control available for command-line apps, in general.
This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).
For what it's worth, at least in Mountain Lion you can change the ANSI palette in Terminal.app. That said, it would never have occurred to me that this is something someone might want to do :).
This certainly hasn't been true since at least 10.7, and I think for longer than that.
Looks to me like it just exposes many of the out-of-the-box Linux terminal features that aren't immediately obvious & require Googling to setup. But saying that it is so amazing it alone warrants ditching Linux and going Mac is a ridiculous statement that certainly wasn't intended to be taken at face value.
I will agree, though, that the Terminal environment on the Macintosh singlehandedly causes me to use the OS X environment instead of windows - and this is after using SecureCRT/Putty for 6-7 years - so it's clearly not a case of "You love what you are used to."
"please wait while 500 megs are being copied". Oh hi non-shared libraries.
I also don't see what's so great about iTerm2, some lights would be interesting. Otherwise I'll claim Konsole is the best termminal emulator in the world, bare none just like that too :)
Finally I do agree that OSX gets Spotlight right. The Linux look alikes for this feature plain sucks. But that's probably the only thing I can see.
As opposed to "press a button (or 30) to copy/install"?
Then again we're comparing OSX to Linux, not Windows (Linux installs are ONE click, which is also less than OSX in fact)
One thing I like about launchd is that on OS X, there is one standard way to launch daemons. On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. launchd also has a bunch of features, one of which is to start services on demand, upon connection to a socket, something Ubuntu hasn't had until the latest 12.04 (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socke...). I do agree, however, that OS X shouldn't be used for anything more than a desktop workstation.
Depends on your distro, really - Arch keep things fairly centralized and simple.
I never really got the hang of Ubuntu, though, by comparison.
You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get
a bunch of command line development tools?
https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action
The problem is that if you are constantly orbiting a certain point of fullness, it goes crazy and keeps deleting and rebuilding all the time, causing slowdowns.
[1] not part of Alfred, but pbcopy/pbpaste in the terminal are your friends.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082
back to linux. (it has ruby too.)
In practice - lots of stuff that you have to get off of the App Store such as LittleSnitch, Arq, SuperDuper, QuickSilver, Carbon Copy Cloner - basically, anything that needs to plumb into the internals of the OS, or break outside the sandbox, will have to be purchased from a third party - and run the (greater) risk, of course, of doing damage to your OS.
More and more as Linux matures and OS X gets buggier/fancier, I don't see the need to use OS X. I am running KUbuntu 12.10 beta on my 2010 MBP and it is pretty pleasant to work with - boots fast, nothing crashes, wi-fi connects and stays so, suspend resume works, no proprietary drivers needed. I did have to do some little hackery to do an EFI install and disable the Nvidia crap and that gives me very good battery life.
To get me to stick to OS X - Apple needs to do significantly better. Each release gives me new headaches and no features I need - bad battery life, Wi-Fi issues, graphics glitches - I can at least try to fix those with Linux.
Now you can do CapsLock-a, CapsLock-e, etc. all day, which is much easier.
I grant you it's convenient in many ways to use OS X, but supporting companies that commit patent mayhem is not good for our industry.
(Yes, yes, I know the competition isn't clean either, blah blah. But you switched from Linux.)
Also, has a heavy computer user I mainly switched to Linux/FreeBSD because of the much improved customization possibilities. While the default OS X experience might be superior to GNOME/KDE, I now get a lot of things done a lot faster since I could make my machine exactly fit my needs. I really cannot imagine why any (not platform depending) programmer would ditch Linux for OS X just because the defaults work better.