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by zer0defex 3557 days ago
No, I wouldn't say it's fine and haven't been - my HN comment history will attest to that. OSX is showing it's age more and more every year. Yosemite. El Capitan. Sierra. You may as well have labeled them iOS integration package 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.

I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days.

3 comments

I install Chrome, Keepingyouawake, spectacle, f/Lux, littlesnitch, MSOffice, atom, iterm2, Xcode and a few others. Many are either done via homebrew or the App Store. Be cool to have a new thread for people's "must have" apps.
Sure, here's the entire list from my last clean install:

http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

Curious as to what other operating systems come with that bevy of tools, since you said "I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days."
Oh, no, definitely not. You're right, that would be absolutely ridiculous. The base 10+ apps or so I mentioned earlier are listed a bit further down in this thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555847

That said, Linux is looking more and more appealing every OSX release and with how much I use it already via docker containers, virtual machines and the like, that will probably be my next move if Apple continues removing power user features from OSX while letting software release quality continue it's decline. There are some amazing open source alternatives available for the vast majority of apps on that list that I've been testing for months now as I honestly don't believe Apple really wants to change to meet the needs of yesterdays power users anymore.

And thank goodness for that. Who says I want those 10 things handled the same way you do?
Which 10 apps would that be, if I may ask??
This is the entire list from my last install: http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

The base apps I almost always start with are:

- Moom (advanced window management)

- Hyperdock (window previews when hovering over dock apps)

- Amphetamine (stop mac from sleeping)

- Alfred (app launcher on steroids)

- FormatMatch (fast toggle copy/paste behavior to include or not text formatting)

- TotalTerminal (drop-down terminal like Quake's console)

- TotalFinder (dual-pane functionality in Finder)

- Radio Silence (simple outgoing app firewall, less annoying than Little Snitch)

- 1Password (everything OSX's keychain should be)

- Parallels (virtualization, it's still a Windows world)