[_jal]

App signing has always been inexplicably horrible; other than Cupertino contempt for their developers, I really don't know what would explain it, it certainly doesn't have to be that way.

But things have gotten worse for developers recently with Catalina. I should note that I don't write mac-specific code - I mainly write things that target Linux servers.

The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market. It is solid, generally stable (although that's been slipping), and certainly has by far the best window manager. It has nice consumer apps for when you need them and is a solid, if not always up to date, unix. The hardware is generally great.

Then the sandboxing, weird parallel fire permission systems/quarantining, new filesystem conventions/restrictions and so on made it incredibly difficult to treat, well, like a unix workstation.

We'll probably keep using Macs at work out of inertia, and it is a lot easier for me to use other resources there. And my personal Mac laptop is probably good for quite a while yet - I tend to get 7+ years out of them. But this is the end of the road for me and the Mac. I require that my tools do what I tell them, not the other way around.

[tincholio]

> The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market. It is solid, generally stable (although that's been slipping), and certainly has by far the best window manager. It has nice consumer apps for when you need them and is a solid, if not always up to date, unix. The hardware is generally great.

I was on that same line of thinking until some time ago when my old macbook pro died, and I ended up again on Linux, on a thinkpad. I'm currently running Manjaro (plasma + i3), and tbh, the Mac's window manager is awful once you get used to the power of i3. Dev experience (for anything but Mac/iOS apps) is probably better on Linux, too...

If you haven't used Linux in a while (as was my case), I can highly recommend it.

[schwartzworld]

Yeah, modern plug and play distros like Ubuntu are not the Linux of yesteryear.

[7thaccount]

I have a System76 fully loaded little NUC. It is a beast, extremely quiet, and was a lot cheaper than a Mac. System76 customer support is really really good. You send an email and you get a response back from a developer pretty quick. I've been pretty satisfied so far. They don't make their own hardware, but they make sure a customized Ubuntu distro (Debian and Fedora are also supported) is silky smooth on all their systems. You pay a little extra, but the process was so painless and still a lot cheaper than Apple, so I'm happy.

[josteink]

> App signing has always been inexplicably horrible;

Maybe on Mac. On Windows you just run signtool.exe and you're done.

> I require that my tools do what I tell them, not the other way around.

Sounds like you'll be glad once you can ditch that old Mac and get a proper Linux dev-machine ;)

[tonyedgecombe]

The problem on Windows is getting and/or renewing your authenticode certificate. Dealing with the certificate authority is like spending time in a Gerorge Orwell novel.

[josteink]

But unlike with Mac, you are free to shop in the market for the least Orwellian CA, because there’s more than just one.