Things I can't do on MacOS which I can do on Ubuntu
I've never "got" the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work.
Here's a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu.
These are all objective facts. These are things which either are impossible, or require adding unsupported 3rd party software - sometimes at a cost.
- Resize the system font
- I find the menu bar at the top too small. The only way to do this on MacOS is to lower the resolution of the entire screen!
- Change the system font
- I know you like
HelveticaSan Francisco - but I find it a bit too thin to read.
- I know you like
- Focus Follow Mouse
- I have multiple screens and multiple windows. I want to be able to hover over a new one and start interacting with it without clicking.
- Change my mouse button order
- On Linux, this is a complex command-line incantation. On MacOS it is impossible. I use a vertical mouse and use my thumb to click. RSI FTW!
- Read files from MTP devices
- If I stick a USB cable between my phone and Linux laptop, I can see the Android files on my laptop. I can open them, move them around, etc. On a Mac I need to install some shonky 3rd party software which rarely works.
- Always on top windows
- Sometimes I want to keep the calculator on screen while I type an email. Is that too much to ask?
- No way to remove UI elements.
- I don't want a notification icon in the top right of my screen. I prefer having the clock on the left. Trivial in Linux, static in MacOS.
- Window snapping
- On Ubuntu, I drag a window to the side or to a corner, and it snaps into position. Vital when using multiple windows at once. On Mac there's a half-hearted splitscreen view which only supports horizontal splitting. Useless on a vertical monitor.
- See tooltips
- Mount an SSH or NFS drive
- In Ubuntu, I get a nice little GUI for picking network shares. Impossible on Mac.
- Wobbly Windows!
- Seriously MacOS. Where's the fun?
I know you're going to be tempted to reply with "you're using it wrong" - but I'm not. This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isn't my computer - it is Apple's. (OK, OK! It belongs to my employer!)
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|I'm sure you are going to be able to categorise them into:
1. Well actually, you can do X with incantation Y
2. Your needs are invalid/you are holding it wrong
3. It's not linux, it's GNU/Linux
4. Ubuntu can't do X tho
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|Foobar says:
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|but I guess it'd make that MacOS top bar completely unusable for anything that isn't maximised/full screen
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|No focus follows mouse?! Dead to me 🙂
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|Double-click on the title bar should work. Except when it doesn't and decides to resize to some arbitrary region of the screen, and you have to minimize and unminimize to restore it to the maximizable state.
Andrew S. says:
Also try holding down option when resizing windows, opening system menus in menu bar (sound, bluetooth).
Herman says:
Here are a list of 3rd party software that solves some of your issues. If not useful for you, it might be to someone who finds this post.
Focus follow mouse -Amethyst (Free and Opensource)
Window Snapping - Amethyst, Moon (Paid), BetterSnapTool (Paid) or ShiftIt (free and opensource).
SSH/NFS mounting - SSHFS/OSXFUSE/MacFusion (free, opensource, hard to use), MountainDuck (paid), Cyberduck (Paid), Expanddrive (Paid)
Hiding notification icon - Deeper (Free)
patents.google.com/patent/US20160…
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|Amy Cupcake says:
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|covid19 says:
There used to be a time OS X was pleasant and a treat to use, somewhere right around Mountain Lion/Mavericks and beyond, each release has become more and more insulting to use, you can't tell where the cloud ends and where "your stuff" begins. They've tried so hard to turn the Mac into something it's not--a phone/tablet, that choice forever reverbs in the piss poor quality of Apple's current and future OS X releases.
Multi billion dollar question is why is Steve Jobs not haunting the literal life out of Tim Cook? I feel sorry for the Mac.
Not being able to bear it any longer, parted with the world of Apple forever once support for El Capitan was dropped, no regrets, never going back. The only thing I didn't initially have was iMessage, but with a little research have gotten my last time machine backup installed as a virtual machine. This is an ideal condition for me, as I believe the "more powerful" OS should be the host, and the slave should be the OS you only really need one or two things from.
Bittersweet ending, but better than folding to the "Apple way", screw that I have my own way of doing things and I don't try to push it on anybody else, unlike Cooks idea of how technology should work
Richard Uschold says:
I partly solved the mouse only copy-paste issues with BetterTouchTool. Not perfect, but you can program the mouse buttons, with a modifier key, to do these functions.
I was always confused by Mac's permitting the middle mouse wheel to scroll a NON-Focused window! Yet, this does not change the keyboard focus, and key strokes still go to the other window! I don't see how this makes any sense at all! ANY mouse button should change the focus, not just the left one!
Both Windows and Linux have hundreds of GUI items the user can change and each one has dozens to hundreds of possibilities. Mac OS has a mere handful of changeable items and a handful of possibilities for each. How is this user friendly? I guess, Uncle Steve knows best! NOT!
I've had two Mac Mini's and over half a dozen other computers, over the years. I've had as many hardware issues with the two macs as all my other computers combined.
My first Mac had more serious issues. The disk controller chip went bad and I had to replace the main circuit board. I assumed I had the bad luck of getting one of the few lemons that every manufacturer occasionally produces and bought the second.
After a few years, the second Mac started booting VERY SLOWLY! I googled this and discovered I had to reset the system parameters in the CMOS RAM. I also replaced the battery. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the problem! Every month or so, I had to reset the system parameters, again! Battery backed RAM? Seriously? Hasn't Apple heard of EEPROMs? They've only been around for decades! Apple is usually at the front of the pack applying new technology. What happened here?
Chris says:
gluconate says:
Third and finally, ...the user interface. Everything from the dimensions of applications, awkward apps that really are designed for mobile and have no real place on a desktop, every release feels like something was taken, beaten and bastardized until it conformed to SOMETHING that looked like iOS, and thrown out there for the peasants (us) to test.
Cook's idea of the Mac has completely and fully destroyed, annihilated, and forever doomed the future of the Mac.
More than anything else, the Mac of today just gets in your way, this is coming from someone who used OSX for ~15 years. Like someone said above, it's not "think different" anymore, it's quite literally "think all the same". All devices are NOT the same, never were, never will be, Cook can try to part the seas and join the land and skies, at the end of the day the Mac will still be a heavily crippled Mac, and not an iOS device like they'd so badly desire it to be. Shame for destroying what was potentially the only commercially viable UNIX.
Andrew says:
Window snapping: BetterSnapTool (paid but cheap)
Mouse button rebinding: BetterTouchTool (free) - though maybe not pure left click.
Still, it has the touchpad which works better than anything else. Generally scrolling works without clicking on a window, but yeah...best of both worlds is to have multiple machines.
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|Link: shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/t…
Comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311655…
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|These will probably cost money, or be SIMBL plugins that require you to disable SIP For them to function correctly...
Since Big Sur there is now an accessibility option to increase the size of the menubar.
NFS is probably a little more fiddly: https://lowhangingfruit.dev/2019-10-21/automount-nfs-on-macos/
Jesse says:
There's the "desktop" view which shows thumbnails barfed all over the screen in a hard to grok fashion, with no application icons and have you have to hover over to see the name.
I don't understand how anyone that has more than two applications open at once thinks that MacOS has a good UI.
Henderson101 says:
Don't Alt/Cmd tab. Use Mission Control. Notice minimised apps live in the dock. I don't alt-tab, even on windows, I use the Task View - which is basically the same as Mission Control.
Jeroen says:
I'm currently using Sway on my work laptop, macOS for my personal laptop, and Windows (under Proxmox) for gaming. The difference in keybinds drives me insane. Also, the touchpad on my 7 years old MBP is better than my work laptop (XPS).
[1] https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
rjc says:
Finder -> GO -> Connect to Server... or simplu Apple+k key combination. Then simply type:
nfs://hostname:/path/to/share
Once opened, drag its title bar icon onto Favourites in Finder and you have yourself a shorcut :^)
That's pretty much any Linux distribution - most software there is 3rd-party and, by the time the packaged version hits the official repository, it is already out of date and unsupported by upstream, or even distribution itself, bar critical security vulnerabilities.
Ik merk dat ik meeknik met de redenen die Terrence geeft. Tegelijk weet ik dat Linux me meer hoofdpijn kan geven om dingen voor elkaar te krijgen. Ik kan al niet meer zonder de copy-paste overdracht met iOS bijvoorbeeld.
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