Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by highace 2536 days ago
You'll be back for the trackpad alone.
3 comments

Incorrect. I have every single touch gesture that I could possibly want on my Linux laptop (a lowly Acer E5 with Manjaro/Arch Linux and XFCE) and they work better and faster and with less annoyance than any Macbook I've ever used.

Furthermore at my desk I use a vertical mouse with 5 buttons which is far, far better than any touchpad.

I'm so glad to never have to use an Apple UI or rent one of their devices ever again! It's such a user-hostile ecosystem, but I don't really blame their users for having such a bad case of Stockholm syndrome.

I have to agree Apple makes a great trackpad.

Most other manufacturers' hardware seems to consistently detect a movement as a drag action. Constantly detecting the wrong movement and drawing a box instead of moving the mouse pointer.

It could be Windows OS that's bad or macOS that's good or a mix of OS and hardware.

The Apple OS is nice but too restrictive for me. Windows I find is kludgy and bloated. Linux is nice if I can find the right distro.

How is macOS restrictive?
Easy.

You can only install it on one brand of overpriced hardware. Does anyone really need to list another restriction to rightfully say that this OS is "too restricted"?

You can't tweak the system nearly as much as you can Linux or Windows. For instance, there is simply no access to certain APIs that Apple uses, such as changing NSScreen visibleFrame, which is why every replacement for the Dock fails with the same bug: Application windows show up behind the Dock replacement.

You can't even change the fucking mouse pointer color!!!!!!! from black to white or any other color that you desire...and there isn't even a third party tool that allows you to do this because of more hidden APIs.

Honestly, I could go on for days about all the restrictive qualities of macOS. I used to have a complete list somewhere, but I chose to simply stop using Macs (unless I have to compile something for iOS) instead of trying to convince others that it's a bad idea.

If you can bear to use it, great for you! Tons of people eat McDonald's too.

In the same line as Ford's 'you can have your car in any color you want as long as it's black', Apple isn't restrictive at all! ...as long as you want to do things the Apple Way™, and only such things as Apple has deigned to allow you to do. Start wandering from the common path much at all and you just straight run in to walls.
Can you give an example?
Sure, one from last week: I needed to connect to an iSCSI target from a client's Mac. This has been easy to do on any Windows machine since at least Windows 7.

OS X? No support without 3rd-party software.

I don’t feel that macOS not shipping with a particular feature can fairly be called an Apple-imposed restriction, especially if you can get that feature from third-party software.

There are plenty of things that you can’t do out-of-the-box on Windows but can on macOS, like SSH into remote machines.

I don't disagree with that. Honestly I'm mostly desktop these days. I'm saving up a bit for a UHK, then will stick a Magic Trackpad 2 in the middle of it.