Giving Apple yet another chance to convince me it is not just a bad joke.

[Eben Stone]

But sheesh, Mac OSx is jess plain the most annoying, least friendly, barely usable operating system I've had to deal with and honestly, I've worked with quite few over the last 40+ years.

I understand your frustration. But... MacOS is not intended for super-users. Just accept this as fact and adjust how and what you do with it. It's not a broken tool. It's a tool that has a safety always on so the user cannot shoot themselves in the foot. It's like a toy. If you can't get past that then you will most likely always be annoyed with it. The desktop environment is quite nice and consistent once you get used to it.

 

[jar_]

I understand your frustration. But... MacOS is not intended for super-users. Just accept this as fact and adjust how and what you do with it. It's not a broken tool. It's a tool that has a safety always on so the user cannot shoot themselves in the foot. It's like a toy. If you can't get past that then you will most likely always be annoyed with it. The desktop environment is quite nice and consistent once you get used to it.

Yup, understand.

But it's usually possible to take the training wheels off at some point.

 

[jar_]

Curious about why you run Ubuntu. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've been away from Linux for the last three years. Is Ubuntu on top now?

I run quite a few different Linux distros. Mostly it's Linux and on the computer I use most often it's Linux Mint. The there is Ubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie and I also run Centos and openSuse plus Windows 10.

 

[vacman]

Not sure if this still works... open finder, applications, find the icon of the app you want to remove, drag it to the trash. You have to do that from the "applications" folder, if that's still a thing.

I'm not sure you can delete any app that's part of the OS. I think they are interrelated and their disappearance could cause other issues, but why not just ignore them? My experience has been that if you're used to the Mac OS, then Windows will appear clunky and non-responsive...and vice versa.

 

[Avi]

I could do that but I already have several boxes running Ubuntu including one laptop. Also a small light Lenovo IdeaPad running Linux Mint.

The exercise is really to test and see if I can make OSx useful or modify ME so I can enjoy OSx.

Have you used macports, homebrew, or fink? It is pretty easy to get a working replica of Linux gnu tools without wiping out the underlying OS which is as I recall BSD based Unix.

At that point the genius of OS X is its like having a linux machine with consumer software on it like Word etc. The graphics can be native Aqua as well as X based ( so there is a X11 port )

The MacPorts Project -- Home

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

www.macports.org

Homebrew

The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux).

brew.sh

Fink - Home

The Fink Team wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X and make it available for download as a coherent distribution

www.finkproject.org

The package manager flavors are like the Linux counterparts.

Once you do that - the navigation through the machine is far easier. Mac OS X has got native su / sudo / bash / perl / gcc built in, btwn that and above you can do what you want

Here is a comparison of these ( these are basically like Linux flavors )

Homebrew vs. MacPorts package managers

Consider ease of use and popularity when picking a package manager.

www.scivision.dev

Avi

 

[jar_]

No, never tried them on a Mac. I do have several virtual machines running on Linux or Windows boxes though. Replacing the old 500 GB Apple HDD with a 250GB modern SSD did mac an surprising difference. I'll bump the RAM up to 16GB on both machines likely this week. But with the SSD the Mac Mini is much nicer.

I always and still believe that the ultimate computer game is SED.

 

[ZJ68]

I understand your frustration. But... MacOS is not intended for super-users. Just accept this as fact and adjust how and what you do with it. It's not a broken tool. It's a tool that has a safety always on so the user cannot shoot themselves in the foot. It's like a toy. If you can't get past that then you will most likely always be annoyed with it. The desktop environment is quite nice and consistent once you get used to it.

macOS is UNIX. People can get into as much trouble as they want with it.

 

[Eben Stone]

...But it's usually possible to take the training wheels off at some point.

macOS is UNIX. People can get into as much trouble as they want with it.

If you can get past the safeties Apple has intentionally added to the OS to prevent you from doing certain things, then sure, maybe it's possible to do anything like you can in Linux.

Maybe 10 years ago... All I wanted to do was install a non-Apple chipset driver so I could run MacOS snow leopard on my AMD based PC using ProjectOSX86. Sounds easy, right?

I got it working, for about one year, and it was a fun hobby for a while. But long term there were a lot of annoyances because of the extra work involved doing what I would consider common admin tasks. 99% of it was bypassing Apple's specialization.

 

[Avi]

No, never tried them on a Mac. I do have several virtual machines running on Linux or Windows boxes though. Replacing the old 500 GB Apple HDD with a 250GB modern SSD did mac an surprising difference. I'll bump the RAM up to 16GB on both machines likely this week. But with the SSD the Mac Mini is much nicer.

I always and still believe that the ultimate computer game is SED.

If you have not seen the underlying Unix of OS X go to

Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

That is a real bash shell, you can ls -al;grep; cat ; awk ; sed etc just as with any other Unix flavor. If you type in “which sed” it’ll be evident it’s all sitting in sensible places like /usr/bin etc

The OS is just a BSD based Unix and the only weird thing they did was all the system files are a bit xml based ( which I find annoying ).

You can ssh into a Mac OS X machine just like any other normal Unix machine ( turning on sshd first ). The kids who jailbreak iOS can ssh right into their iPhones for the same reason.

Mac OS X is super memory hungry so I think the 16 gigs of ram will help make it usable. I have a 2013 laptop I still use as we speak. For a laptop to go now onto 9 yrs or so and still be functional is worth putting up with their specialized hardware support to be honest. Couple that with the fact that it’s Unix and I can run photoshop / Lightroom and read people’s word documents, the Apple tax amortizes itself pretty quickly.

The gnu links above are really just because everyone thinks Linux is Unix these days ( with some degree of irony ) so having the gnu versions of all the things you are used to makes people happy.

 

[jar_]

Mac OS X is super memory hungry so I think the 16 gigs of ram will help make it usable. I have a 2013 laptop I still use as we speak. For a laptop to go now onto 9 yrs or so and still be functional is worth putting up with their specialized hardware support to be honest. Couple that with the fact that it’s Unix and I can run photoshop / Lightroom and read people’s word documents, the Apple tax amortizes itself pretty quickly.

The gnu links above are really just because everyone thinks Linux is Unix these days ( with some degree of irony ) so having the gnu versions of all the things you are used to makes people happy.

I went there and grep and awk and sed were there but and make and yacc required adding additional tool. That they are available is good.

The issue of an old laptop still being functional though surprised me. I have some that are pretty long in the tooth and still function and in fact one that runs 24/7 with the battery sitting on the table beside it (avoiding heat). It's an old HP Pavilion 2000 but has been running Ubuntu for ages. IIRC I bought it in 2008 or 2009.

And as mentioned back in the OP the new to me Macbook Pro is a 2012 version. I wanted that year since it was still user serviceable including battery replacement. But when I got it home I found it only has 127 cycles on the battery so practically brand new. It's comforting to know that if needed I can easily replace the battery.

I'm learning though. I found out how to turn off the annoying animations and fixed the mouse so it behaves like I wanted and the same with the trackpad on the Macbook and hid the useless stuff like photos and music and mail and facetime.

I installed Photoshop Elements 2021 and found GIMP which I prefer so I'll dl it next.

 

[Avi]

Good luck! Their ultimate goal is to make Mac OS indistinguishable from iPhone OS then merge the two. With their own proprietary chips now in the computers, they are well on their way. They seem to be completely unconcerned with the professional markets that still use Mac because of certain software.

Their "proprietary" chip is just their flavor of an ARM chip - which somewhat ironically is far less proprietary than the intel chipset because of the way ARM licenses their chip architecture to anyone who wants it.

I went there and grep and awk and sed were there but and make and yacc required adding additional tools. But that they are available is good.

The issue of an old laptop still being functional though surprised me. I have some that are pretty long in the tooth and still function and in fact one that runs 24/7 with the battery sitting on the table beside it. It's an old HP Pavilion 2000 but has been running Ubuntu for ages. IIRC I bought it in 2008 or 2009.

I think because some of the older mac os Xs came with tiny SSD drives, they left XCode (which is basically gcc ; make ; etc ) off the machine by default as most people don't code, but it is pretty simple to install and free.

I think Linux based machines - particularly if you are non upgrade crazy - tend to be stable. Its the consumer OSs (windows) that tend to go into unusability over a few years (well at least pre-windows 10). I think ubuntu is debian based so a bit apt-getty ?, One of those package managers is based on apt-get so its like having an ubuntu os X


Btw even finger and whois are still there, at that point OSX is retro computing

 

[jar_]

[QUOTE="Avi, post: 11351165, member: 130564"
Btw even finger and whois are still there, at that point OSX is retro computing
[/QUOTE]

Ah, but what about gopher and archie and jughead and veronica? And is the last e still missing in creat ?

 

[Go West Young Man]

Sorry, MACos is incredibly powerful and configurable - what exactly are you trying to do that you can't manage to make work? I'll talk you through it

 

[jar_]

Sorry, MACos is incredibly powerful and configurable - what exactly are you trying to do that you can't manage to make work? I'll talk you through it

Make it something that is not annoying, clumsy and awkward.

But I'm getting there. They are now comparable to other low powered computers of similar age running Windows and Linux. As it stands currently I could live with either of them. The key is turning off as much Apple stuff and replacing it with Linux/Windows versions.

 

[rfm8os]

If you like to tinker with your OS you won't be happy with MacOS. There used to be 3rd party utils you could get that give you more lower level control of some things, if you want to go that route, but really if that's what you are looking for I would think Linux would be better for you.

As far as the user experience it's very different than Windows and Linux so you have to wrap your head around that. If you are willing to put the time in for that and stop trying to understand why each and every thing is different it will go better for you.

Applications in MacOS are self contained packages so if you drag the app icon to the trash that IS how you uninstall it. However, some applications that need more system integration may put stuff in places that aren't easy to find. Those applications sometimes include an uninstaller inside the package contents so if you right click and do "show contents" on the app icon you may find an uninstaller in there but not always. So if you want to completely erase anything an app installed somewhere then there are also 3rd party utilities that can help with that.

I am a software dev and have been on MacOS exclusively now for years and don't miss Windows at all. Pretty much everyone I deal with through work (designers, management, software engineers) use a macbook pro now though that is mostly for Java, mysql database and web front end stuff, so depending on the kind of work you do you may need apps that are better suited to running on Windows or Linux.

Gaming is one area where there is no contest. If you are a gamer, get a Windows rig.

 

[jar_]

As mentioned above, the only game I'm familiar with is sed.

This is simply an exercise with me, a plaything. I retired from IT a couple decades ago so any programming I do is recreational. But right now I have a dozen computers running 24/7 mostly just to play with and crunch numbers for World Community Grid (WCG)

Since I was pretty much hunkered down during the last year or so it was something to do. I'd find an old box and then rebuild it making is something usable again. They mostly ended up as linux boxes but some windows. Some I would give to kids that didn't have a computer and others simply ended up in the WCG farm. The Mac stuff started once I was fully vaccinated and ventuing out of my house. I found the Macbppk Pro at a garage sale and it seemed like a fun project. I must admit that it has been. The Mac Mini was an old one that I'd put away in the Box of Shame about a decade ago. It's coming along and like the Macbook Pro seems pretty much comparable to other low powered decade old systems. Nether one is likely to ever become a favorite but for now they will crunch numbers, serve as an educational tool and challenge and likely someday go to a forever home.

 

[Avi]

As mentioned above, the only game I'm familiar with is sed.

This is simply an exercise with me, a plaything. I retired from IT a couple decades ago so any programming I do is recreational. But right now I have a dozen computers running 24/7 mostly just to play with and crunch numbers for World Community Grid (WCG)

Since I was pretty much hunkered down during the last year or so it was something to do. I'd find an old box and then rebuild it making is something usable again. They mostly ended up as linux boxes but some windows. Some I would give to kids that didn't have a computer and others simply ended up in the WCG farm. The Mac stuff started once I was fully vaccinated and ventuing out of my house. I found the Macbppk Pro at a garage sale and it seemed like a fun project. I must admit that it has been. The Mac Mini was an old one that I'd put away in the Box of Shame about a decade ago. It's coming along and like the Macbook Pro seems pretty much comparable to other low powered decade old systems. Nether one is likely to ever become a favorite but for now they will crunch numbers, serve as an educational tool and challenge and likely someday go to a forever home.

that 2012 mini is a good machine, it’s actually better than the completely crippled 2014. I used that machine as a plex server / client as well as a time machine / NAS until about 3 years ago when the motherboard finally committed suicide ( that machine was on 24/7 with crappy 1870’s house wiring ) continuously. I bought a used 2014 off of someone on Craig’s list only to realize they had soldered the memory in inexplicably When the M1 mini came out I bought that to replace it but my wife ( who had been using the 2013 i7 ) liked it so much she stole it and it’s her remote workstation for work. That thing drives 5K monitors so it’s great for cad / architecture etc.

To be honest the thing that got everyone’s attention is less the OS ( windows 10 is really pretty stable now but it is still not Unix ) but the fact they took the arm chipset … which was always meant to be cheap not necessarily good and somehow leapfrogged intel with it on the midrange end certainly on a performance / watt basis. What that means to the Xeon side of things is the popcorn munching story of the year Somewhere btwn nvidia and arm/Apple ( and probably the AWS) computers are fun again

 

[jar_]

that 2012 mini is a good machine, it’s actually better than the completely crippled 2014. I used that machine as a plex server / client as well as a time machine / NAS until about 3 years ago when the motherboard finally committed suicide ( that machine was on 24/7 with crappy 1870’s house wiring ) continuously. I bought a used 2014 off of someone on Craig’s list only to realize they had soldered the memory in inexplicably When the M1 mini came out I bought that to replace it but my wife ( who had been using the 2013 i7 ) liked it so much she stole it and it’s her remote workstation for work. That thing drives 5K monitors so it’s great for cad / architecture etc.

To be honest the thing that got everyone’s attention is less the OS ( windows 10 is really pretty stable now but it is still not Unix ) but the fact they took the arm chipset … which was always meant to be cheap not necessarily good and somehow leapfrogged intel with it on the midrange end certainly on a performance / watt basis. What that means to the Xeon side of things is the popcorn munching story of the year Somewhere btwn nvidia and arm/Apple ( and probably the AWS) computers are fun again

The 2012 models in both the Mac Mini & the Macbook Pro are also pretty much user serviceable machines and I just tend to prefer that to the disposable concept that seems so common today. But I'm easily satisfied. I was gobsmack going from 300 baud to 1200 baud and on to having two full T1 lines. Even Bang Path was amazing.

 

[Go West Young Man]

Make it something that is not annoying, clumsy and awkward.

But I'm getting there. They are now comparable to other low powered computers of similar age running Windows and Linux. As it stands currently I could live with either of them. The key is turning off as much Apple stuff and replacing it with Linux/Windows versions.

That's not a flaw in the OS, it's just your personal preferences.

 

[jar_]

That's not a flaw in the OS, it's just your personal preferences.

Of course. It was a design choice Apple made and honestly, one that many find endearing.