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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • That’s for MBR partitioned disks, where they fight over the first sector of the disk which is used as the boot sector.

    Computer models starting from around 2013 should support UEFI boot. If you boot in UEFI mode you use a GPT partitioned disk with an EFI System Partition. In there Windows does not overwrite grub. In mine for example grub was in the ESP under /EFI/fedora/ and Microsoft found the ESP and put its stuff in /EFI/Microsoft.

    The worst I’ve experienced is that Windows puts the Windows Boot Manager back on top of the UEFI boot order, to fix that, I wrote a comment before, that I’ll just link here, if it’s really just the order you can also just change it back in the UEFI menu.

    Another bad thing is that some laptop UEFIs, especially early ones are utterly broken. They ignore your boot order, or your entries in the UEFI boot manager, sometimes they just load the fallback path defined in the UEFI spec, which is \EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.efi, but that’s the OEMs fault. I’ve seen both Fedora and Microsoft write their loader to the fallback path. I’m not sure if they clobber the other ones if it exists already, because I never boot from that path, so I wouldn’t notice.






  • So much.

    • Window Management, especially fullscreen
    • Alt Tabbing Behaviour
    • Default Keyboard Layout
    • The Dock with its forced defaults (Finder leftmost, Trash rightmost etc)
    • No volume control over HDMI
    • Power Management (no manual hibernate, closing lid always sleeps)
    • File System Support
    • The reactions that auto trigger on webcam
    • The Global Menu
    • Unchangable limit to virtual desktops
    • Default apps being hard to change in some cases (mailto: links for example)
    • The weird software installation process with dragging icons to a special folder
    • That I can’t temporarily disable a system management profile
    • The way the BSD tools are slightly different than the GNU ones, with grep slower for certain patterns
    • No Package Manager by default (unless you count the App store with forced accounts)
    • Weird filesystem setup, far from FHS

    I have installed various pieces of third party software to fix some of them, but still, those are things I dislike about macOS.





  • To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, MonitorControl, Amphetamine, Firefox, Thunderbird, qView and duti to set the latter three up as the defaults.

    As a package manager I’m pretty happy with nix-darwin, now I get all the CLI tools there, and what isn’t packaged, like wireshark for example, I get through my nix-controlled homebrew.

    Coming from a Linux userland you might want to replace some coreutil packages with their GNU variants. I ran into one case where the GNU grep was much faster than the BSD version preinstalled in macOS for example.

    What I haven’t found a good solution to yet is Filesystem support. Both NTFS and ext4 are missing. I currently have a Linux VM just for that. I think Paragon sells a driver, have been meaning to look into it more, but haven’t.

    Edit: To be fair to macOS the App called Preview is a pretty good PDF reader in my view.

    PS: If you ever need to use dd on macOS, be aware that there are /dev/rdisk handles instead of /dev/disk for the un-buffered access. Its significantly faster for dd shoveling.

    PPS: You will probably have to turn off what they call “natural” scroll. macOS inverts the default for some reason.