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by masklinn 5428 days ago
> Every time I get my hands on a Mac, even to simply Google something, I immediately hit issues.

You seem to hit issues because you want to hit them.

> Paste is crazy squiggly hash v (or maybe apple v?)

The key is called "command". Does "Command V" not make more sense than "Control V"? And free up the Control key for more interesting stuff?

> I can't right click

You can, unless it's a 4+ years old machine it's just a preference (if you're using a trackpad). Any 2+ buttons mouse will natively "right click". Even on older machine, Ctrl+click will open a contextual menu.

> I can't win+d to the desktop

"Show Desktop" is natively bound to Command-F3 on modern macs, on older ones it was on F11. It may also be bound to an active corner.

> So, go ahead, someone sell me on Macs.

Don't know if that will sell you. For me it was a combination of several things:

* Unix environment with an actually useable terminal. By default. Even in 10.3/10.4 (and Terminal has come a long way since then). cmd.exe never "felt" right, I never found a windows shell worth using (even Putty is a pain), and if you're going to remote log into a nix machine anyway why not use one in the first place?

Spotlight works much, much better than Windows Search, and dedicated launcher applications (QS, Alfred, QSB, Butler, etc...) take that a step further

* 99% of the time, managing applications is Simply Easier. No fudging around with installer or painfully browsing to your Program Files folder (and wondering if the soft is 32 or 64b and in which program files you should put it and if you should create a shortcut so the bloody windows search can find it and...). Instead, open your archive (zip or dmg), drop the .app bundle in the Applications directory (via the dock or your finder sidebar) and launch it whenever. You can even launch it right there, nothing to do, no time wasted.

* A thriving indie community with loads of good software at fair price. I did buy licenses one Windows, but not many, and I did not find much which made me go "damn I have to give these guys some dough back for their work", even after I stopped being a poor student.

* Package managers. Whichever your pick is between Macports, Fink and Homebrew having one is invaluable.

* The machine is generally useable as is. Even if you don't download anything it can be used, you have a good PDF & image viewer (Preview is fairly amazing), lots of serviceable software, and it does not "feel" as clunky as windows long did.

Only negative I've found is that Finder is not as good as the Windows Explorer. Though with Windows 7, they've become significantly closer in that search has become shit in 7's explorer.

Essentially, OSX is a full unix with a bearable interface, softed by people who care.

Now if you don't do any dev on your box, it might lose some of its appeal.

5 comments

Good points. Though it seems like you and the other repliers are selling him based purely on downsides of Windows. A modern Linux such as Ubuntu has more or less all of the things you've mentioned, and as a biased Gentoo Linux user I'd argue in many cases Linux does it better. ( http://www.thingsfittogether.com/2011/08/start-developing-fo... ) So it seems like you're arguing "Mac is a better environment to use VNC for your Linux than Windows is." Unless you want to convince him he also should switch to Mac for development? I'm actually curious how much the GP does on his Linux box besides development. Personally I only use Windows for games and the occasional x-to-exe conversion. (Oh and Flex development at work with Adobe's Flash Builder.)
Until you want to go mobile. Linux on a laptop is still a hit-or-miss experience w.r.t fully functioning power management, wifi without workarounds, and integrated/discrete graphics cards. I know there are perfectly working laptops available out there, but it's still a hassle to track down, find reviews, verify compatibility as stated, then actually install linux since almost nothing ships preinstalled. Then you might want to run QT/GTK/Wx/Tk stuff all side by side on the same machine and that lacks cohesiveness and makes a linux desktop feel very hacked together.

Also, trackpads.

You get the features of Linux with the ability to run commercial content creation apps like Flash, Photoshop and Cubase. It's very win-win for someone who does a lot of different kinds of work. And since all the shortcuts use Command, the Control key gives you free Emacs keybindings in every text field.

I was only able to give up on Mac OS X when I decided to give up on Adobe software thanks to Adobe's abysmal customer service. Now that I don't need to be able to run Photoshop, I just use Linux.

What about Home and End keys? I used a Mac for 6 months, but really really really missed the Home and End keys to go to the beginning and end of lines... Terminal is hell without them...
Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line. Standard emacs keybindings work almost everywhere in OS X. But, you can also rebind the home/end keys - http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

Edit: On a Macbook Pro, home/end are fn-left/right-arrow and page-up/down are fn-up/down-arrow.

>>> Ctrl-a, ctrl-e for beginning/end of line.

Alternatively: Command+← and Command+→ .

Don't have the iMac anymore, but what made matters worse was that I switched Control and Command to make more of my shortcuts work. Command+C or Command+V isn't a very natural finger movement on the Mac keyboard I had. Ctrl+V fits much better and matched up many more (Windows) keyboard shortcuts.

But it made shortcut listings more confusing, because that would become Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ (which I'm pretty sure I tried in Terminal but would always skip to the end of the command line, not the end of the screen line). The only keyboard shortcut that hurt after switching command and ctrl was in chrome. Chrome's History is Ctrl+H on windows, but Command-Y on mac, due to Command+H hiding the current window. That got me every time.

The home and end keys drive me crazy.
Thanks. A lot of people are telling me how to do the keyboard shortcuts in Mac. Well, I realize you can do them, I realize I'll have a small learning curve. My point was: that's a saved cost if I don't switch, so what's the ROI for taking that time? I'm not trying to start a holy war or point out how "ridiculous" macs are to use. I'm simply stating I have to go grok mac, I see a lot of other people have, and wonder if I should.

I'll say, cmd.exe is complete shit and almost enough. The OSX terminal has essentially been the only thing I've seen in the past that makes me want to switch and maybe one day that will do it.

Also, I guess the compatibility mode and admin mode constant switching around is a bit of a PITA. So, that's probably a good reason as well.

Maybe it will come down to apps though. So far, I'm quite happy with Win desktop apps, but I guess I can get most in OSX anyway.

Thanks for your comments.

Why is a package manager useful? (I really don't know what's wrong with the default environment of OSX, if there's anything wrong at all.)
Speed and reliability. Take open source. You could manually find, download, untar, configure, make, install and track dependencies. A good package manager lets you do that in one command e.g.:

  $ brew install package_name
OSX includes a package manager for proprietary packages blessed by Apple. It's fast and reliable but its curators forbid most open source and proprietary packages. It's called App Store.
Ignoring the problem of software availability, the App Store also lacks a fast command line interface. I can kick off a homebrew package install process and return to whatever I was doing faster than the App Store.app launches.
If you're coming from a linux environment, you're probably used to having Apt or Yum available. OSX has no built in package manager so you've either got go out and find compiled binaries somewhere or install from source, both of which are tedious and searching the web for it is time consuming vs. the `brew install wget` commands that you can probably guess and it'll take care of installation in the background while you do something else.

See here for stuff you can install with one command: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula...

Oh, I see, so you cannot use yum on OSX? I never realised it (or its packages) wouldn't be compatible.
No, Yum isn't available or compatible, it's coupled to Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS linux distributions like Apt is coupled to Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distributions.

Homebrew/MacPorts/Fink are nearly the same thing, they just don't come installed by default on OSX.

Got it! Thank you!
The Finder can be replaced with Pathfinder - the Finder for Hacker News readers...
Meh. I find Pathfinder clunky and ugly. For improvements to the Finder I much prefer TotalFinder: http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/
Oooh, nice, hadn't heard of that.