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As much as we have a lot of contempt for Apple's walled-garden thing and refuse to buy another Apple product again if we can help it, we are forced to admit that macOS is a really, really nice operating system for a power user, and in ways you need years with it to appreciate.
It's also, you know, full of weird quirks and issues, painful in all sorts of ways, just like all the other operating systems. We're… almost ambidextrous, we are equally used to macOS, Windows and various flavours of Linux, we alternate between them constantly, they all suck.
But tragically I think we like macOS the best of all of them, because it just has so many little things that are really fantastic if you're a creative user? Even if Apple's entire App Store strategy and attitude to backwards-compatibility strangle creativity, so it's love-hate.
Today, this was brought to you by QuickTime. A word you probably have contempt for if you're a Windows user, with good reason. But on macOS, this is a bundled app, and it is simply the best no-frills built-in audio/video/screen-recorder app on any OS we have used.
Imagine the old Windows “Sound Recorder” app, if it:
• also recorded video
• also recorded your screen
• made it easy to select which video/audio sources you want to capture
• had useful editing (good UI for trimming the start and end of a clip)
• was… pleasant?
One of the reasons macOS has such a strong footing among creative users, by the way, is that its audio subsystem “just works” and has the high quality and low latency needed for creative applications. Linux users will be shocked by the former, and Windows users by the latter.
(Obviously audio works by default on Windows, but the Windows audio subsystem sucks so hard for creative use that if you actually want to do music production, you have to buy special hardware and use special software that, together with special “ASIO” drivers, bypass it entirely)
There's of course a hundred or a thousand other things we like about macOS that make it all feel joined-up. Like… the touchpad/laptop experience is the best of any OS, the high-DPI experience is the best of any OS, the Terminal, Finder and basically any app play well together…
Like, did you know that on macOS, every single app you have open that has some kind of “file” it's editing (text, video, image, DAW project, even a folder, whatever) represents this with a tiny little icon in the titlebar that you can click and drag into other apps? It rules.
This particular thing is so goddamn useful. You never have the problem of “oh goddamnit how do I find this file/directory/whatever that I have open in some other app”. It's especially useful if you're a heavy Terminal user, like we are of course. You really suffer without it!
Right, also: the Mac keyboard layouts are different to the standard Windows “PC” ones and the weird proprietary Linux ones, and not only are they the most comfortable to use on a laptop-sized keyboard, they are full of modifier-key goodies that make being non-monolingual liveable
The default US and British layouts on macOS have all the modifier combos you need to fluently type in English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese… with full punctuational finesse, without switching keyboard layout! It's a big deal!
Like, we could go on and on for days about this kind of stuff. There are a million reasons to use macOS as your main OS or to own a Mac. Anyone who tells you that Macs are complete overpriced garbage is completely delusional. But if they say it's all golden, they're also deluded.
macOS is also like, unsurprisingly, the most hostile of the big three desktop OSes to you… installing software via a means other than the App Store, because Apple just hate your fucking guts and want you to suffer if you do that? It's not as easy to bypass as you think.
And the tragedy of that is that macOS's whole .app/.dmg bundle thing is the best way of installing software that isn't via an App Store or package manager. Every app on macOS is almost what Windows users call a “portable app”, but with OS-level support for it… kinda.
Also, the backwards-compatibility story on macOS is pitiful at this point. 1990's Mac software is out of the question, and 2000's software only works if you're very lucky and it's not a video game. This is still better than the Linux compatibility story, but it sucks! It sucks!
Windows is the only major OS that has a good backwards-compatibility story. You can go and find some random office productivity package released in late 1995 on CD-ROM, insert it into a USB DVD drive connected to a Windows 11 laptop, and there's a very good chance it'll just work
We'll shut up, this is more than enough, but I hope it gives you a picture of why we hate all the major OSes and are not-so-secretly planning to make our own that's just, something we can actually live with.
One final aside: why are we like, so obsessed with backwards-compatibility?
Because we have the kind of perspective that comes from being alive for nearly 30 years and we want the tools and media we are attached to remain available to us for, you know, another 30 optimistically.
It's fun being able to like, listen to the same music, watch the same videos, play the same games we were into when we were 10 years old. It's fun being able to pick back up old artistic projects from when we were 15 or 20 or 25 years old. YOU CANNOT TAKE THIS FOR GRANTED.
If you are a creative type and have any attachment to the past — which is a given, you are the experiences that have formed you — it is hell to live in a world that constantly robs you of your memories and skills by backwards-incompatibility, DRM expiration, websites going down
Creativity can survive in the cloud-first, streaming-first, App-Store-first, break-everything-every-five-years-first world, but it will not flourish, and we do not like it, and unfathomable amounts of stuff will be lost when one of the Big Tech companies goes bankrupt, and we cry
We will have to stop ourselves going any further than that, but you probably sense that this is the thing we believe in most strongly in the whole world by this point, and it is, and we do intend to do something about it. And it is deeply related to the OS thing, alas.
✌️
@hikari@social.noyu.me Also I have a huge collection of games in my backlog that I have no chance to complete before they become unplayable on new systems.
@hikari the linux compatibility story? *giggles* is there such a thing?
@hikari are there weird proprietary linux keyboards? TIL!
@esoteric_programmer linux users generally just use standard PC layouts, physically speaking, but the default bindings for e.g. the Alt Gr key do weird things on a typical Linux distro, different to what they do on Windows and macOS, and there's a laundry list of weird keyboard layouts that are supported because i guess some guy somewhere wanted them once, it's a real mess