I switched from Linux Mint desktop to an M1 Air last year.
Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about).
I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of trouble with everything else.
I could not get a mouse setup that worked (I'm strictly no acceleration, and macOS's acceleration was literally making my arm ache).
I switched because I stopped being a fulltime developer, my main machine was getting old (6 years), and macOS has good MS Office support.
Overall I'd say I'm about 70% efficient vs on Linux, a bit less so when in active development. The mobility makes up for it, and efficiency just isn't as important to my day-to-day for now.
Many of my gripes are listed elsewhere, but things like middle-click paste is something that is easy to write off but was actually a gigantic part of my process. Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app?
I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers!
>Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app?
I find this is often the case with MacOS, sometimes with open alternatives available.
I wanted windows/linux like window snapping and found a free solution called Rectangle[0], but discovered however they do it was causing mouse lag in games. Apple dev friend investigated into it with logs from my machine and discovered they are "just not doing it properly, go buy bettersnaptool[1]"
Sure enough I go spend $8 on bettersnaptool and all my mouse lag is gone and I've got the tweakable window snapping I crave.
This is often the case it just depends if the open software solution is done "properly" or will have some small bug that may or may not bother you. Rectangle worked flawlessly in every other instance except once I would launch a game, the mouse lag was not present on desktop applications.
Rectangle is fully open source, so rather than working with the community to fix the problem you're having (about 1/10th the effort you went into debugging the problem), you instead opt for a paid app? What you do if you were using Linux?
The mouse acceleration curve on Mac drives me insane. There is a way to set it to "0" with some command line incantation, but it still does not set it to 0.
Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.
> Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me.
Oh yeah I just plugged a mouse into a work Mac recently and was super confused at this. Yes I’ve gotten used to natural scrolling on touchpads by now, but no that doesn’t mean I want it on a scroll wheel!
How do you "zero mouse acceleration" people survive? I have three monitors side by side. If I went with zero mouse acceleration, I'd need a 3 meter wide mouse pad in order to be able to move the mouse cursor edge to edge! Or do you do that mouse bicycle move where you constantly pick the mouse up, bring it back to its original position, move it some more, pick it back up, and so on? Such a weird subculture :)
Hated that I couldn't flip scroll direction because I wanted the trackpad to be natural and mouse to be inverted. Found this: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
The acceleration seems to scale with the mouse sensitivity setting. With the setting at 0 there is very little or no acceleration. You'd need a mouse with adjustable dpi setting to use it like that though.
> Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app?
I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers!
Yes I have noticed this too! I love my MacBook, but the idea that I would pay what, $20, for the top tier window snapping app is completely ridiculous. That’s something that should be built in to the shell!
I love Rectangle. I have a couple of external displays, and a 25 key macro pad. I've assigned various buttons on the pad to move my windows around using Rectangle.
The audio behavior is always a little funky on macOS, for the specific steps given I think the problem is that the 'play' button on the keyboard is more like a 'resume' button really, which can cause it to do seemingly bizarre things if you haven't been doing any audio recently. I would expect that if you clicked play in Spotify, then pause, then hit the key on the keyboard it should behave.
This. I get the M1 must be very good but what I really want is something I doubt I'm going to get: native Office support in Linux. I use Office rarely but on those rare occasions it sucks to use Office 365.
Depending on your needs I find older Office versions play pretty well in Wine. 2007 is insanely easy to install and 2010 isn't too bad with PlayOnLinux or Crossover. Word, Excel and PP work very well although as you get outside those it's less good.
> I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers!
That’s just the traditional way in which the Apple ecosystem works. They provide you with a pretty phenomenal starting point and App developers fill in the gaps.
Base macOS with Amphetamine, Magnet, and perhaps some utility for file/network access provide you with a desktop experience that comes close to the productivity of a tiling window manager, but certainly meets or exceeds the features built into Windows 10 or KDE for window management. Plus you can use AppleScript if you really want to get creative with desktop management.
The problem is that most of these apps are only available in the App Store which can only be used if you dox yourself to Apple (an Apple ID requires an email and working phone number).
It also transmits your hardware serial to Apple when you use it.
> Custom hot keys are easy in MacOS settings menu.
I use this feature all the time. Unfortunately, lately there seems to be a goblin in my system that's occasionally going in and deleting App Shortcuts for a specific app and I have to re-create them. Any ideas? I was thinking the app was getting updated or something like that so Mac forgets the settings.
It seems like an oversight to have a physical backlit button with play/pause icons on it taking up space on the mac keyboard that can't be generally used to play/pause applications.
It's like making TVs you can install arbitrary applications on, but shipping them with remotes with branded buttons to open one or two specific preinstalled applications.
This doesn't work. Mouse acceleration isn't exposed using a defaults key anymore. You need to use a tool like linear mouse to modify the scaling value.
In the before-times, in the long-long-ago, we could modify basic system settings from a nice discoverable GUI control panel. Why is the future year of 2022, no doubt filled with flying cars and personal jetpacks, continually found to be unable to deliver features we took for granted in 1995?
2 of these 3 things, I have done multiple times on a Mac. Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS and has been for nearly a decade. Mounting SSH is supported by 3rd-party tools, yes, but they're the same cross-platform 3rd-party tool you'd use in Linux... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac and is not installed by default in most Linux distributions (although fair enough it's installed by default on Ubuntu).
The only thing I wasn't familiar with is MTP, which is apparently a Windows-specific protocol that Microsoft forced into the USB standard in later versions, and as far as I know across decades of using Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS across multiple computers on the same network with shared peripherals I've never even used this protocol.
What's the complaint again?
OS choice is mostly a personal preference. As far as I am personally concerned, FreeBSD is the best OS possible to use, and macOS is second best. But I don't write blog posts telling people that their preference is incapable of doing things my preference is capable of doing, and if I were to do so, I'd at least do my research first to make sure it was correct.
" ... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac ..."
I've given a lot of thought to ssh/sftp mount points (for obvious reasons) and the standard recipe (and support answer) at rsync.net has been FUSE/sshfs.
I've even written a handful of scripts and one-liners to support my personal use of sshfs on my own machines, etc.
But lately ... I've just switched to using "Mountain Duck" which does everything I want and is quick and easy and slick and professional.
I forget what the license cost is, but it's worth it. The "official" FUSE for OSX and sshfs packages were getting old and came from odd sources (sshfs for mac is from 2014) and I don't think you can 'brew install' them, etc.
You can install sshfs via brew, but it works a lot better if you just download the package manually.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend using sshfs on Mac. I used it for about a year, and about 90% of the time it worked great. The rest of the time it would hang, just not sync, not let me write files, etc. and every couple of weeks it would break so badly that a restart was the only fix, usually at the most inopportune times.
I ended up just grabbing an old external hard drive and installing syncthing. The remote server still has all the RAID and backups and whatnot, but now I basically have a local cache on the old hard drive, so it works consistently and is fast. If it breaks, oh well, I'll get another one and sync it again.
I created an HN account just to second this comment. I still can’t understand the thought processes that goes into similar blogs that like to trash one OS for another or another.
If you like something, awesome! But making something else look bad because you didn’t like it does not make your thing any better.
The article uses the phrase “objective fact” in the introduction which, to me, is a huge red flag, and it ultimately served as an accurate predictor of what was to follow. There are plenty of things to criticize in macOS, but the complaints in this piece were inane, inaccurate or overwhelmingly nit-picky.
MTP is used by basically every single Android phone and tablet. It's also used by some other devices like MP3 players. Because of the first point it's actually extremely widespread...
I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer.
As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this.
Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.
This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.
OSXFuse is now replaced with sshfs, but it’s now a PITA to install it via Homebrew because macFUSE, a dep for sshfs has turned closed-source and Homebrew would refuse to install sshfs for that reason.
You’d have to install macFUSE binary from their official site first, and load their kernel extension via the GUI, before running the Homebrew command to solve it.
Which begs the question: if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?
..and MacOS lets you mount an nfs share ootb as a user.
On linux you need an fstab entry for that though that is really not an issue at all.
How you ask?
You do this with the mac specific command: mount_nfs
Here is how I use it to mount shares from my NAS.
$ mount_nfs -o nolocks,nfsvers=3 /home/nas/myshares/nfs /Users/bob/nas/nfs
I think you are misreading the author, their point is all this works by default on Ubuntu and not on Mac with the exception of NFS.
It's not that there are no solutions, it's that the author and as a matter of fact I too resent that we have to look for solutions.
From my point of view when I plug my phone in my linux box it just works but when I plug it in my Mac nothing happens, thus MacOs is an inferior operating system. As in it fails to operate in the manner I would like it to.
I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player."
I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.
There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.
> I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player."
This comes from [1] which is an interesting page.
It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately).
Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither.
Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.
> I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.
This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS.
MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default.
I briefly considered penning a response called "Things I can’t do on Ubuntu which I can do on macOS" and then realised nobody has that much free time, especially me.
I think you are making an understandable misreading (but perhaps i am!). MTP is a standard promulgated by the USB Implementers Forum [1], just like the mass storage or human interface device protocols. What that paragraph means is that on Windows, MTP is dealt with by the media framework, as opposed to being part of the storage subsystem, as SMB and NFS are. Why is why you can't access MTP devices as if they were volumes on Windows.
This reads like "my use case defines what a computer is," which is absolutely as tiresome an argument as any fanboy debate.
I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.
(1) Good hardware with good software support goes a long way. I'd say that iOS is much more of a polished OS than macOS. No wonder, considering that it's the iOS devices that fuel Apple's profits, not Macbooks.
(2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
I daily drive a mac, it earns me my living doing everything from development to writing specs. There's a bunch of compromises, weird decisions etc, but none of them are holding me back from doing my job. I vastly prefer this setup over windows and wsl.
I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.
Why are specific protocol support needed to be a general purpose computer and not a toy/specialized tool?
Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.
ROFL. Yes, "as a toy". Things that 99.9% of Hacker News (and 99.999999% of the general public) has literally never had a need to do, their absence surely just invalidates it.
Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.
> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering
I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.
On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
I'm willing to accept your argument that a Mac is not a general purpose computer. It then begs the question of why these devices are so popular for software development...?
I switched from Linux to MacOS around 14 years ago.
With Linux it's not only that I could change everything (system font, acceleration of the mouse pointer etc), but I literally HAD to do it. First days after buying new laptop and installing Linux I had to spend of configuring everything – from mouse pointers to Google calendar integration, often with obscure command line or config setups.
That was fun.
Until I bought first Macbook Air and discovered that I don't need to reconfigure everything anymore. Touchpad had just perfect speed/acceleration of the pointer. Mail/calendar/contacts was syncing out of the box. Fonts were awesome. Screens and external montiors just worked. Wifi just worked. Hybernation/sleep just worked.
So this is true on Linux you can configure way more than on MacOS. But the reason behind it is what keeping me with Macbooks all these years.
The last 14 years have seen a lot of changes to linux desktops and window managers. There are several high quality options that require very little to no configuration to have a pleasant experience.
Hardware wise, things are a bit mixed. I'm writing this from an LG gram that runs perfectly out of the box- screen, wifi, sleep, everything Just Works. The battery life is fantastic.
The only real configuration that I've done is the same configuration I would do on a mac anyway via karabiner / hammerspoon.
I've used Linux for 20+ years. I have to give it to Linux Mint, it's almost there, like 95% there. The remaining 5% is painful, but ignorable enough.
Desktop linux has come a long way since the Corel or Mandrake Linux days.
I use it in my PC nowadays and it's ok. I think the current iteration of the nonworking hardware (before it was soundcard/winmodem/bluetooth/graphics) are Laptop technologies like multi monitor with right resolution or fingerprint scanning.
Linux has always had problems with hardware though (not your fault, but still your problem).
So much this. I realized I want to use my computer as a tool to perform work and consume entertainment, and not as a hobby in and of itself.
I used Debian sid for about a decade and later switched to Ubuntu for a few years before biting the bullet and buying a Mac around OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I'm extremely thankful for my Linux years, as I gained now-invaluable information about low-level system issues that I use nearly every day at my job. But I don't think I'll ever use it as a desktop operating system again.
Similar experience here. My macos (actually pretty much all my apple devices just work). Could it be better? Sure, in some cases…but does it work well enough…definitely.
I watch other folks spend hours and days tweaking up a new machine. For me, I could swap out my Mac in less than an hour and likely have an identical user experience. That to me has more value than hyper levels of control.
Lots of replies saying Linux has changed. My experience is that it’s exactly the same: potluck. For some people, things just work, for most people they mostly work, and for a good chunk of people it’s a lot of effort to get a usable machine.
I switched to Mac around 2009 and have regularly gone back to Linux. It’s just not appropriate for a workhorse machine that you don’t want to have technical problems with, sadly.
I have a friend who loves Linux, has used it and nothing else since the 90s, and he said he would still never recommend it for anyone but a tinkering hacker.
Linux machines are great for dev, but terrible for any kind of management, and the UX generally sucks. I love Linux but it is not the right tool for the job unless your job is pure dev or you enjoy tinkering. Mac remains the best compromise, but it is a major compromise.
True. But have you tried the latest Ubuntu for example? Everything works out of the box on my HP EliteBook. Touchpad works great as well. I didn't need to configure anything.
Time hasn't stood still. Both Windows and Linux have improved tremendously.
Sure, I have huge respect for Linux and confident that it provides decent experience nowadays. If I have had extra money, I would definitely buy some latest ultrabook and install one of the latest Linux distros. Not to much incentive though, as I'm a bit locked into Apple ecosystem now (M1 is sick, insane comfort with stuff like airdrop, copy/pasting text from phone/tabled into laptop, iCloud etc).
I like this post. For the first time someone actually provided a list of things and more so jumped right into them! Most of the apple posts go into a long philosophy rant about walled gardens and other bs. Glad to see a legit list and they have a legit point.
Exactly, both informative for MacOS users and those who never used it.
MacOS users can quickly scan and think yeah I don't care about this feature, or think huh this is something that could be useful and maybe I should look for a 3rd party app which has this.
Those considering switching to MacOS can compare to their existing environment and have a greater picture of what possible pain points to expect.
I would like to see more of posts like this for all Desktop environments. Like things you can do in MacOS but not in default Ubuntu setup.
This list is personal and far from exhaustive (which is fine). If I quickly scanned looking for things I care about, I'd find very little. However, as a Linux user I could very quickly come up with an equally long list of things that I do care about and that does not overlap much with this one.
I think the larger point is: in Linux, some things are complicated but most things are possible. On Mac and Windows, some things are easier but many things are impossible.
So there's definitely a tradeoff. But since I have to use this tool for the majority of my waking hours in order to make a living, the ROI from taking a bit longer to solve an issue and then having it solved virtually forever makes Linux a better proposition IMHO.
I was actually a bit disappointed in the article. I thought it was going to explain some kind of substantive work or task that the author can do on Linux but not Mac OS. Instead, the things he lists all boil down to Mac OS being a lot less customizable.
That absolutely true but I feel like we all already knew it.
I'm always amazed at how many little third party utilities or programs people recommend downloading or buying just to bring the desktop experience on macOS up to parity with Linux (or even Windows!).
The lack of snapping/tiling at this point is just a deliberately malicious decision. I can't fathom why they will not implement some version of this better than that half-hearted split screen view that requires a separate virtual desktop.
> Like he wants to move the clock. Oh my god just leave it where it is
> and get on with your job.
I have an ultrawide monitor. I would very much like for the macOS clock to be centered in the menubar (except when using the built-in display, which for some ungodly reason has a notch in it) or failing that at least to the left of the menu icons. It makes a huge usability difference for me, as otherwise I have to physically turn my head, and sometimes crane my neck depending on how my eyes are treating me.
This is impossible out of the box, and maybe possible depending on what third-party tools I hack together. IIRC command-dragging used to work on the clock, but either it never did and I'm misremembering, or the clock and the iOS-replica Quick Settings panel are special and exempt.
> I'm amazed that people don't just use the software as it's designed.
Why? Sometimes it's badly designed for a use case you're unfamiliar with, and needs a fix. Sometimes it's just hobbyists being hobbyists. This forum is called "Hacker News," after all.
There are different brains out there, and they think differently, and understanding that is half way to developing empathy, but also extremely important when developing accessible applications.
Maybe I don't want to see the clock whenever I look at notifications, or vice versa, because that's extremely distracting. Lack of customisability gives us less accessible software. Apple is really good at accessibility, but at the same time really bad.
The catch is, with enough 3rd party apps MacOS can do all that stuff but no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience. To match macOS on Ubuntu you will need a full time Linux guru as PA to smooth things out for your. You will need another one for the after hours. Therefore, Ubuntu is great for really rich people or people who need that one thing that Ubuntu excels at and nothing else.
It's essentially the same issue with iPhone v.s. Android. There's always some Android phone that can do one thing better than the best iPhone out there and to have an overall better-than-iPhone experience you need to use a dozen Android devices all the time(buying and maintaining multiple devices is unrealistic for most of the people, you need to be really rich and have a PA to manage all that for your. Another PA for the extra hours).
As someone who uses both, I have to say I am not sure what's so special about the 'macOS experience'. I mean the desktop is not even a decent window manager imo, I have to get something like PathFinder for a decent file manager etc, yes there are some nice apps for macOS but it's not like the OS experience itself is some unbeatable benchmark.
Different strokes for different folks. I run a pretty vanilla Ubuntu on a desktop at home, and macOS on an M1 laptop at work. The out of the box experience on Ubuntu / Gnome these days feels better to me for the things I do: web browser, terminal, emacs, and perhaps an unfair addition-Steam games.
The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible.
I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.
Same reason they default to whole filesystem search and disorganized icons. No idea what the reason is, but there seems to be a wellspring of bad somewhere.
> I'm always amazed at how many little third party utilities or programs people recommend downloading or buying just to bring the desktop experience on macOS up to parity with Linux (or even Windows!).
You say that like there aren't always recommendations for GNOME extensions to install to make it act like it isn't a tablet.
Well I think it’s mostly because Linux users tend to not realize it’s an entirely different paradigm. Someone once put it roughly to me as Linux and windows being window focused, macos bring application focused
Mac users eagerly recommend importing Linux tools (Docker, Brew) to make MacOS a tolerable dev environment. But they completely miss the fact that Apple makes it illegal to do the reverse: I can not run a MacOS VM on Linux.
I can't understand the mindset that makes that kind of company behavior acceptable or the tradeoff worth it.
You don't want to anyway. OSX is slow without hardware graphics acceleration.
EDIT: I've hit my comment quota, here's my response: You don't need OSX for that, just their headers and libraries. People have built the build chain for Linux but it's useless without those and they cannot be redistributed.
- Debug apps which don't opt into debugging, using gdb/lldb, without disabling SIP. It's my computer, I should be root, I should be able to introspect how processes execute on it. Not being able to do so prevented me from debugging https://github.com/samschott/maestral/issues/597, since I had to disable SIP, which required rebooting, which stopped the bug from happening.
- Edit $PATH for IDEs launched from the Mac GUI (to add MacPorts/Homebrew-installed Ninja to Qt Creator's binary search $PATH). ~/.profile isn't evaluated at login time (only in terminals), /etc/paths doesn't work (forgot if it affected terminals, definitely doesn't affect GUI apps), and `launchctl setenv PATH` didn't work in my testing.
- Install libraries like SDL systemwide in paths searched by default by build systems and runtimes, like on Linux. MacPorts installs to /opt/local, Homebrew on M1 installs to /opt/homebrew, neither of which is searched by build systems. I might try setting up developer environments using Nix at some point, but I haven't learned how to use Nix/nix-darwin beyond editing the set of global apps.
>- Debug apps which don't opt into debugging, using gdb/lldb, without disabling SIP. It's my computer, I should be root, I should be able to introspect how processes execute on it. Not being able to do so prevented me from debugging https://github.com/samschott/maestral/issues/597, since I had to disable SIP, which required rebooting, which stopped the bug from happening.
Another option is to re-sign the application with the entitlements necessary for debugging.
- No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. All a new workspace achieves is making it difficult for me to switch between this app and my other apps! (individual apps can implement this, and some like VLC do, but most apps don't)
- No native support for containerisation. Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally everything else is super speedy, they're really slow.
> Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally everything else is super speedy, they're really slow.
Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd<->inotify or you end up running intel images on aarch64, which uses non-virtualizing qemu to emulate the foreign CPU (see github.com/tonistigii/binfmt)
I'm using Docker in a Fusion instance, sharing /Users through vmhgfs (which in my tests performs better than DfM shares) and it's plenty fast as long as I stick to native images (intel on intel, aarch64 on arm64) and don't outrageously reach out to the shared dirs (notably DfM shares /tmp by default which is ridiculous)
Container tech on Darwin would bring little in most cases since it would containerize a darwin userland, which, while cool, is probably not what most people want. There's no shortcut from running a Linux kernel in a VM to run a Linux userland on Darwin.
> Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd<->inotify
If you haven't tried the new VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing in Docker for Mac, it makes a _huge_ difference to I/O performance of mounted volumes.
I'm using Docker for Mac on an M1 Pro and it's stupidly fast, to the point that my dev environment runs faster than the Intel production servers on some things.
Or they could do what windows did. Support windows docker for whatever use case that supports (never used it) and creating WSL which has Linux roots deep in the OS. I find WSL docker works great for development. Certainly wouldn’t use it in production.
> No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace.
One of the reasons why I almost never use the full screen feature. You can click on the full screen button on the too left-hand corner of each window whilst holding Option, I think that’s the closest you can do out-of-the box. You can assign a keyboard shortcut for this very easily (seriously, the way we can define keyboard shortcuts for almost anything and have them work in almost any app is amazing; nothing comes even close on the Linux side).
Otherwise, you can use something like Magnet or Rectangle, which enable exactly what you want.
I do use magnet. But something I do want something to be truly fullscreen (no menubar or anything else visible), but without being on another workspace. I think the most common use case for this is with videos. I often want to fullscreen a video, but still be able to quickly switch between windows so that I can for example reply to a message.
Note that with any non-fullscreen window I can continue to see live updates to the window in the mission control view. So I could for example continue to watch a video (albeit smaller) while watching chat messages arrive in another window as my friend sends them. But with a macOS fullscreen window I can't do that. If I open mission control then I can only see the fullscreen window (because it's the only window in the workspace), and if I switch to another workspace to the see the contents of those windows I can no longer see the fullscreen window. Infuriating!
What keyboard shortcuts are you missing in Linux? At least with KDE, I can go the entire day without touching the rodent. And on the rare occasions that I do use the mouse, I'm mostly touching it only for webpages that don't work with Tridactyl, or for highlight-middle-click copy-paste.
Interesting. I recently started using an M1 Mac and found the fullscreen workspaces a bit weird (coming from i3), but kinda grew to like it? I got the external trackpad and use gestures a lot (before it was Control + arrows) to navigate the workspaces.
My main issue is that all the different "Terminals" have subsets I like on them, but none have all the features I like lol. It's not a big deal though. FWIW I'm trying out the Warp term now (used wezterm on linux) and it's been mostly enjoyable so far.
For me, those gestures are next to useless because the animation is just waaay too slow. It's literally a whole second (exactly; I just timed it) of waiting for window focus to switch.
The animation is shorter when you're on a model without a 120Hz screen, so it gets a little more bearable there.
Hold Option and double-click the window corner. This will probably do what you want (fill all of the available space). You can also do this with the sides of the window and have it grow only horizontally or vertically.
I would also recommend trying out if BetterTouchTool can't change the behaviour of the green (+) button as it's pretty powerful.
For those who don't mind "full screen" still including the top bar, I find https://www.hammerspoon.org/ to be a good compromise. I set up option+shift+f to full screen my window instantly.
+1 for this. Hammerspoon is a godsend. I have keyboard shortcuts to switch to my desired apps instantly (around 10 or so, hyper+I is IntelliJ, hyper+A is Atom, hyper+F is Firefox etc.)
Holding Option when you click the green window button will maximise the window - rather than make it full screen - for most, but but not all, applications. For some reason Safari only maximises vertically when you do this.
macOS has never had full-screen maximisation. It maximises "for the content". Which means some windows will never be full screen because they don't have more to show.
What you get when you hold Option is the way that was the previous "maximisation" option, before they added the full screen mode which I also abhor.
Readit News
Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about).
I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of trouble with everything else.
I could not get a mouse setup that worked (I'm strictly no acceleration, and macOS's acceleration was literally making my arm ache).
I switched because I stopped being a fulltime developer, my main machine was getting old (6 years), and macOS has good MS Office support.
Overall I'd say I'm about 70% efficient vs on Linux, a bit less so when in active development. The mobility makes up for it, and efficiency just isn't as important to my day-to-day for now.
Many of my gripes are listed elsewhere, but things like middle-click paste is something that is easy to write off but was actually a gigantic part of my process. Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app?
I had to pay for an app in order to properly emulate middle clicks on the touchpad! That's bonkers!
I'll leave this final tidbit though:
On Linux:
* Open Spotify
* Press play button on keyboard
* Spotify plays
On Mac:
* Open Spotify
* Press play button on keyboard
* Apple Music opens ??????
I find this is often the case with MacOS, sometimes with open alternatives available.
I wanted windows/linux like window snapping and found a free solution called Rectangle[0], but discovered however they do it was causing mouse lag in games. Apple dev friend investigated into it with logs from my machine and discovered they are "just not doing it properly, go buy bettersnaptool[1]"
Sure enough I go spend $8 on bettersnaptool and all my mouse lag is gone and I've got the tweakable window snapping I crave.
This is often the case it just depends if the open software solution is done "properly" or will have some small bug that may or may not bother you. Rectangle worked flawlessly in every other instance except once I would launch a game, the mouse lag was not present on desktop applications.
[0] https://rectangleapp.com/ [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=...
https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
Do you trust Apple's app review
Like three finger (middle click) on the touchpad ... Apple just can't do it ... Linux sorted it for multiple manufacture's touchpads years ago.
Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.
Oh yeah I just plugged a mouse into a work Mac recently and was super confused at this. Yes I’ve gotten used to natural scrolling on touchpads by now, but no that doesn’t mean I want it on a scroll wheel!
It does just work. You're just using it wrong.
Keep that second sentence in mind whenever people say that first line and you'll never have any issues with apple fans
It does (generally) just work! However, it works they way they want you to use it.
That's fine for me and I usually am happy to adapt. It doesn't mean infinitely configurable.
Are there links to this acceleration? Thanks.
Yes I have noticed this too! I love my MacBook, but the idea that I would pay what, $20, for the top tier window snapping app is completely ridiculous. That’s something that should be built in to the shell!
Use https://www.spectacleapp.com/ - it's free.
It's not exactly the same, but better in many ways - excepting the auto-drag snapping. Snapping is via key combination instead.
CursorSense to customise the acceleration graph (or disable).
SensibleSideButtons so you can use mouse4/5 in the browser.
ScrollReverser so scrolling on mouse and touchpad both make sense.
Rectangle for window snapping.
> * Open Spotify
> * Press play button on keyboard
> * Apple Music opens ??????
I just tried these steps. Spotify plays.
Modern Macs literally have a one-touch "send my supercookie to the manufacturer" button.
This. I get the M1 must be very good but what I really want is something I doubt I'm going to get: native Office support in Linux. I use Office rarely but on those rare occasions it sucks to use Office 365.
That’s just the traditional way in which the Apple ecosystem works. They provide you with a pretty phenomenal starting point and App developers fill in the gaps.
Base macOS with Amphetamine, Magnet, and perhaps some utility for file/network access provide you with a desktop experience that comes close to the productivity of a tiling window manager, but certainly meets or exceeds the features built into Windows 10 or KDE for window management. Plus you can use AppleScript if you really want to get creative with desktop management.
It also transmits your hardware serial to Apple when you use it.
* Press cmd + option + S
* Press space bar
* Spotify opens and plays
or
* Press cmd + option + spacebar (opens terminal)
* `sp` (my spotify cli alias)
* Spotify opens and plays
Custom hot keys are easy in MacOS settings menu. Even easier is the free app Hotkey! https://codenuts.de/en/posts/hotkey/
I use this feature all the time. Unfortunately, lately there seems to be a goblin in my system that's occasionally going in and deleting App Shortcuts for a specific app and I have to re-create them. Any ideas? I was thinking the app was getting updated or something like that so Mac forgets the settings.
It's like making TVs you can install arbitrary applications on, but shipping them with remotes with branded buttons to open one or two specific preinstalled applications.
Works on my M1 Max well enough to be satisfied with my mouse in SC2.
The only thing I wasn't familiar with is MTP, which is apparently a Windows-specific protocol that Microsoft forced into the USB standard in later versions, and as far as I know across decades of using Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS across multiple computers on the same network with shared peripherals I've never even used this protocol.
What's the complaint again?
OS choice is mostly a personal preference. As far as I am personally concerned, FreeBSD is the best OS possible to use, and macOS is second best. But I don't write blog posts telling people that their preference is incapable of doing things my preference is capable of doing, and if I were to do so, I'd at least do my research first to make sure it was correct.
I've given a lot of thought to ssh/sftp mount points (for obvious reasons) and the standard recipe (and support answer) at rsync.net has been FUSE/sshfs.
I've even written a handful of scripts and one-liners to support my personal use of sshfs on my own machines, etc.
But lately ... I've just switched to using "Mountain Duck" which does everything I want and is quick and easy and slick and professional.
I forget what the license cost is, but it's worth it. The "official" FUSE for OSX and sshfs packages were getting old and came from odd sources (sshfs for mac is from 2014) and I don't think you can 'brew install' them, etc.
Mountain Duck.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend using sshfs on Mac. I used it for about a year, and about 90% of the time it worked great. The rest of the time it would hang, just not sync, not let me write files, etc. and every couple of weeks it would break so badly that a restart was the only fix, usually at the most inopportune times.
I ended up just grabbing an old external hard drive and installing syncthing. The remote server still has all the RAID and backups and whatnot, but now I basically have a local cache on the old hard drive, so it works consistently and is fast. If it breaks, oh well, I'll get another one and sync it again.
If you like something, awesome! But making something else look bad because you didn’t like it does not make your thing any better.
In the version I was using, mount-readonly yes, mount-readwrite no. Had to install Mounty for readwrite.
Deleted Comment
> Mount an SSH or NFS drive
I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer.
As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this.
Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.
SSH mounts are done with osxfuse
MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp
This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.
You’d have to install macFUSE binary from their official site first, and load their kernel extension via the GUI, before running the Homebrew command to solve it.
Which begs the question: if I’m already jumping through hoops to get SSH mounts on macOS to work, why not use Linux already?
Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?
I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.
..and MacOS lets you mount an nfs share ootb as a user. On linux you need an fstab entry for that though that is really not an issue at all.
How you ask? You do this with the mac specific command: mount_nfs Here is how I use it to mount shares from my NAS. $ mount_nfs -o nolocks,nfsvers=3 /home/nas/myshares/nfs /Users/bob/nas/nfs
This seems like a reasonable complaint.
It's not that there are no solutions, it's that the author and as a matter of fact I too resent that we have to look for solutions.
From my point of view when I plug my phone in my linux box it just works but when I plug it in my Mac nothing happens, thus MacOs is an inferior operating system. As in it fails to operate in the manner I would like it to.
I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.
There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.
This comes from [1] which is an interesting page.
It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately).
Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither.
Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS.
MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default.
That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…
[1] https://www.usb.org/document-library/media-transfer-protocol...
I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.
(2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.
Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.
Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?
https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ
Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.
I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.
On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
With Linux it's not only that I could change everything (system font, acceleration of the mouse pointer etc), but I literally HAD to do it. First days after buying new laptop and installing Linux I had to spend of configuring everything – from mouse pointers to Google calendar integration, often with obscure command line or config setups.
That was fun.
Until I bought first Macbook Air and discovered that I don't need to reconfigure everything anymore. Touchpad had just perfect speed/acceleration of the pointer. Mail/calendar/contacts was syncing out of the box. Fonts were awesome. Screens and external montiors just worked. Wifi just worked. Hybernation/sleep just worked.
So this is true on Linux you can configure way more than on MacOS. But the reason behind it is what keeping me with Macbooks all these years.
Hardware wise, things are a bit mixed. I'm writing this from an LG gram that runs perfectly out of the box- screen, wifi, sleep, everything Just Works. The battery life is fantastic.
The only real configuration that I've done is the same configuration I would do on a mac anyway via karabiner / hammerspoon.
Desktop linux has come a long way since the Corel or Mandrake Linux days.
I use it in my PC nowadays and it's ok. I think the current iteration of the nonworking hardware (before it was soundcard/winmodem/bluetooth/graphics) are Laptop technologies like multi monitor with right resolution or fingerprint scanning.
Linux has always had problems with hardware though (not your fault, but still your problem).
So much this. I realized I want to use my computer as a tool to perform work and consume entertainment, and not as a hobby in and of itself.
I used Debian sid for about a decade and later switched to Ubuntu for a few years before biting the bullet and buying a Mac around OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I'm extremely thankful for my Linux years, as I gained now-invaluable information about low-level system issues that I use nearly every day at my job. But I don't think I'll ever use it as a desktop operating system again.
I watch other folks spend hours and days tweaking up a new machine. For me, I could swap out my Mac in less than an hour and likely have an identical user experience. That to me has more value than hyper levels of control.
I switched to Mac around 2009 and have regularly gone back to Linux. It’s just not appropriate for a workhorse machine that you don’t want to have technical problems with, sadly.
I have a friend who loves Linux, has used it and nothing else since the 90s, and he said he would still never recommend it for anyone but a tinkering hacker.
Linux machines are great for dev, but terrible for any kind of management, and the UX generally sucks. I love Linux but it is not the right tool for the job unless your job is pure dev or you enjoy tinkering. Mac remains the best compromise, but it is a major compromise.
Time hasn't stood still. Both Windows and Linux have improved tremendously.
I would like to see more of posts like this for all Desktop environments. Like things you can do in MacOS but not in default Ubuntu setup.
I think the larger point is: in Linux, some things are complicated but most things are possible. On Mac and Windows, some things are easier but many things are impossible.
So there's definitely a tradeoff. But since I have to use this tool for the majority of my waking hours in order to make a living, the ROI from taking a bit longer to solve an issue and then having it solved virtually forever makes Linux a better proposition IMHO.
That absolutely true but I feel like we all already knew it.
Dead Comment
The lack of snapping/tiling at this point is just a deliberately malicious decision. I can't fathom why they will not implement some version of this better than that half-hearted split screen view that requires a separate virtual desktop.
Like he wants to move the clock. Oh my god just leave it where it is and get on with your job. Lack of customisability gives us more stable software.
And he wants his windows to wobble? What on earth is the point of that?
This is impossible out of the box, and maybe possible depending on what third-party tools I hack together. IIRC command-dragging used to work on the clock, but either it never did and I'm misremembering, or the clock and the iOS-replica Quick Settings panel are special and exempt.
Why? Sometimes it's badly designed for a use case you're unfamiliar with, and needs a fix. Sometimes it's just hobbyists being hobbyists. This forum is called "Hacker News," after all.Computers should be made to serve people, not the other way around.
Maybe I don't want to see the clock whenever I look at notifications, or vice versa, because that's extremely distracting. Lack of customisability gives us less accessible software. Apple is really good at accessibility, but at the same time really bad.
> And he wants his windows to wobble?
Some people are fun at parties, some are not.
To have wobbly windows.
Monkey brain sees shiny things. Monkey brain releases dopamine. Monke brain happy.
But I would expect a mature desktop operating system to have improved window management capabilities in 2022
It's essentially the same issue with iPhone v.s. Android. There's always some Android phone that can do one thing better than the best iPhone out there and to have an overall better-than-iPhone experience you need to use a dozen Android devices all the time(buying and maintaining multiple devices is unrealistic for most of the people, you need to be really rich and have a PA to manage all that for your. Another PA for the extra hours).
What kind of experience are we talking about?
The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible.
I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.
You say that like there aren't always recommendations for GNOME extensions to install to make it act like it isn't a tablet.
I can't understand the mindset that makes that kind of company behavior acceptable or the tradeoff worth it.
EDIT: I've hit my comment quota, here's my response: You don't need OSX for that, just their headers and libraries. People have built the build chain for Linux but it's useless without those and they cannot be redistributed.
(Homebrew started on Mac OS X)
- Edit $PATH for IDEs launched from the Mac GUI (to add MacPorts/Homebrew-installed Ninja to Qt Creator's binary search $PATH). ~/.profile isn't evaluated at login time (only in terminals), /etc/paths doesn't work (forgot if it affected terminals, definitely doesn't affect GUI apps), and `launchctl setenv PATH` didn't work in my testing.
- Install libraries like SDL systemwide in paths searched by default by build systems and runtimes, like on Linux. MacPorts installs to /opt/local, Homebrew on M1 installs to /opt/homebrew, neither of which is searched by build systems. I might try setting up developer environments using Nix at some point, but I haven't learned how to use Nix/nix-darwin beyond editing the set of global apps.
Another option is to re-sign the application with the entitlements necessary for debugging.
e.g:
https://gist.github.com/talaviram/1f21e141a137744c89e81b58f7...
- No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. All a new workspace achieves is making it difficult for me to switch between this app and my other apps! (individual apps can implement this, and some like VLC do, but most apps don't)
- No native support for containerisation. Containers/Docker are a great technology, but even on my M1 mac where literally everything else is super speedy, they're really slow.
Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd<->inotify or you end up running intel images on aarch64, which uses non-virtualizing qemu to emulate the foreign CPU (see github.com/tonistigii/binfmt)
I'm using Docker in a Fusion instance, sharing /Users through vmhgfs (which in my tests performs better than DfM shares) and it's plenty fast as long as I stick to native images (intel on intel, aarch64 on arm64) and don't outrageously reach out to the shared dirs (notably DfM shares /tmp by default which is ridiculous)
Container tech on Darwin would bring little in most cases since it would containerize a darwin userland, which, while cool, is probably not what most people want. There's no shortcut from running a Linux kernel in a VM to run a Linux userland on Darwin.
If you haven't tried the new VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing in Docker for Mac, it makes a _huge_ difference to I/O performance of mounted volumes.
One of the reasons why I almost never use the full screen feature. You can click on the full screen button on the too left-hand corner of each window whilst holding Option, I think that’s the closest you can do out-of-the box. You can assign a keyboard shortcut for this very easily (seriously, the way we can define keyboard shortcuts for almost anything and have them work in almost any app is amazing; nothing comes even close on the Linux side).
Otherwise, you can use something like Magnet or Rectangle, which enable exactly what you want.
Note that with any non-fullscreen window I can continue to see live updates to the window in the mission control view. So I could for example continue to watch a video (albeit smaller) while watching chat messages arrive in another window as my friend sends them. But with a macOS fullscreen window I can't do that. If I open mission control then I can only see the fullscreen window (because it's the only window in the workspace), and if I switch to another workspace to the see the contents of those windows I can no longer see the fullscreen window. Infuriating!
My main issue is that all the different "Terminals" have subsets I like on them, but none have all the features I like lol. It's not a big deal though. FWIW I'm trying out the Warp term now (used wezterm on linux) and it's been mostly enjoyable so far.
The animation is shorter when you're on a model without a 120Hz screen, so it gets a little more bearable there.
I would also recommend trying out if BetterTouchTool can't change the behaviour of the green (+) button as it's pretty powerful.
What you get when you hold Option is the way that was the previous "maximisation" option, before they added the full screen mode which I also abhor.
When you hold ALT while clicking the maximize button it should work. There used to be a setting for this when they introduced it.