Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things – or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more …
Seriously. It can't be masochism, or else they'd be using the stock settings. Perhaps I'm just too poor to understand why one would go though such trouble to make it less unusable when a plethora of superior operating systems are just a boot loader away. Not just Linuxes, there's also BSDs.
For exactly the reasons they gave in the article. It's a desktop for those of us who are too lazy to spend time configuring desktops.
> We tend to use Macs as if they were Linux machines with a shinier desktop – we don't use most of Apple's apps and services.
I totally get that, for someone of a sysadmin nature, like many people here, they have the chops and interest to configure Linux to their exact preferences. Personally, I find Linux quite pleasant to configure, mostly via Ansible, on VMs. Can't say I really enjoy the experience on a laptop (Ubuntu 2204/2404 on a Framework laptop, certified OS, but not pre-installed for me) . Though, again, different strokes for different folks, I understand why people who want to really customize everything might want to do just that.
I'm a dev, not a sysadmin. I like coding, not hunting down configuration settings. A browser, text editor, a terminal, git, postgres, bash/zsh, dev tools, a package manager and I am happy and could care less about the desktop chrome.
BSDs are many things, but from my vague understanding (and respect) for the subject, they are not easy desktop machines for the ignorant.
i.e. Why impose your worldviews on others?
1. Support. Compare an ISP's tech support response to, "Hi, CableCoISP? My Internet keeps dropping out every few hours here at home. I have a laptop with Windows|macOS|ChromeOS," vs. "... I have a laptop with Linux|Open BSD|FreeBSD|NetBSD|Dragonfly BSD|SunOS|Solaris|OpenIndiana|Unix|Haiku|Plan 9|9Front|OS/2| ..."
2. Not everyone who wants to change the way their desktop works (or restore it to the way it previously worked) wants to get down-and-dirty with the bloody low-level config settings. Lots of people want the OS version of automatic transmissions. Renember the old X11 right-click menu of Destroy/Top/Bottom/Raise/Lower/... etc.? People like you or me could either quickly work out how to use it by experimentation, or by RTFMing the relevant docs. "Most" people either can't or won't.
3. Again, unlike you or me, many people consider installing a new/different OS a Really Big Deal.
Why not?
macOS is an outstanding operating system without these additional tweaks.
I don’t know why some people feel the need to try and rain on other people’s parade.
I use windows and Linux as well as macOS.
Each has their own issues and positives.
A true computer geek embraces all tech that they find beneficial to them and never dismisses what they haven’t used.
Yes, all of this and thumbs up. I love an operating system - all of ‘em - and especially ones I can fiddle about with. I love open source. It’s the reason that my PowerBook 100 has WiFi now, and can (fairly comfortably) access Wikipedia. It’s the reason my kids can game with modern games and not need to worry about whether DLLs need updating all the time. It’s how we watch tv without having some godawful amateurish UI imposed on us by Sky or BT.
And you know what? I really dislike the Android SDK (conversely, I think the iPhone SDK and associated tools are great). But even that’s okay because there are legions of people who think oppositely to me, or who prefer something else entirely. None of them are wrong, so isn’t it great that we’re all catered for?
The only operating systems I object to are the ones imposed upon me - so I only work for companies that let me choose my way of working and, since I’m a senior manager now, I make sure that all the people who work for me are able to work with the tools they prefer too. It’s such a boost to productivity.
This. However much you try and bend one system to look and behave like another, there will always be stiff bits that won't bend.
Embrace it, run with what you have, changing how you work when swapping systems helps keep the brain active.
And what is this "text editor" for MacOS of which the author speaks? What's wrong with vi in the command window?. Works for me.
People like what they feel more productive with.
Partner has had Macs for decades, but in the workplace had to use Windows & MS Office products.
On home Mac I had to install LibreOffice as she got frustrated with Pages (Mac "in built" word processor) as too different from Word for her to get up to speed quickly, whereas Libre Office was very similar to Word so she could be productive in a short time..
There are many reasons to use it:
-If you are a computer novice, MacOS has been proven to be much easier to use than Windows. Linux, unless you stay within somebody's preconfigured walled garden, is not even remotely so.
-If you are an advanced computer user who has stuff to do, it is fantastic because it gives you almost all the power a linux box gives, without having to waste time doing side-quests to make something work so you can get on with your day.
-It is infinitely more stable than both linux and windows as a desktop experience. I don't have to worry about Microsoft or some AV vendor trashing the entire OS from one hour to the next.
I've noticed that the only people who really like windows are:
1. gamers (understandably)
2. People who know just enough to be dangerous
3. Like religion, people who started with windows and refuse to try anything else.
I used to revel in the details when I was younger and my plate of knowledge was empty. Now, I have real tasks to complete and the last thing I want is to hit a wall because the OS disrupts my workflow. I gave up on Windows because of Microsoft's capricious UI changes and unstable updates. I gave up on linux (as a desktop) because even as recently as a couple years ago, the UIs are both capricious AND don't give the level of system control that MacOS or Windows has.
My OS usage boils down to:
Windows - Only for games. Too unreliable for anything else
Linux - Servers, appliance-like systems, and when I need to have intimate control of whatever
MacOS - Everything else
right, and take your cheap second hand laptop and upgrade it from the 8 gig it came with to 32 gigs. That something you can do with a mac? may upgrade the ssd to 1Tb from 500 gb. can so that with a mac? at a certain point the potential speed differences are academic. usually not much use except for bragging rights.
Every keyboard I have, including the official Apple one and even the built-in one on my Macbook has media keys. Guess which is the one application they do NOT work on?
Yes, it's Music. Seriously.
At some point some genius at Apple came up with the idea that they ought to control other things too, and gradullay they forgot that these keys actually had an original function. I general I very much like the MacOS UI, but this one has me baffled.
Before I forget, I would be remiss not to mention the excellent Objective See tools but they're more for protection and, of course, the mighty iTerm 2 which is an absolute must if you live on the command line or very frequently visit them. For me it works great with certificate protected SSH sessions. Terminal is OK, but iTerm 2 has a couple of bells and whistles that makes it flat out excellent.
MacOS is an accumulation of things that work slightly wrong over the years that never get fixed.
In Catalina you can't put a shortcut to write-only folder in the Finder sidebar and drag things into it. Why would you want to do that? Download apps with your normal user, drag it to a folder owned by the administrator, switch to administrator, and install/drag the app to Applications (after changing the owner to administrator of course), then switch back.
The work around? Put a shortcut to the same write-only folder in the dock, drag things there, and it works as it should.
Little things like that that all over the place.
Literally every OS is like that. It's unavoidable. That's why MacOS is IMO superior. Why? Exactly because they _don't_ constantly screw around with stuff. They make changes over time, yes, but they don't endlessly throw out the baby with the bathwater the way Microsoft does.
Having to deal with idiosyncrasies is one thing. But having to relearn an entire new batch of idiosyncrasies every couple years because the vendor decided to make sweeping changes to their desktop is infinitely worse.
It worked properly in previous versions so they do screw around with stuff or they forget why things were done the way they were done. You've probably forgot what it used to look like.
And after Catalina the iOSisation just gets worse.
Until there exists a crack (open-source or otherwise) to bypass the installation DRM that Apple introduced to the aarch64/ARM builds of macOS, then it will always be a non-starter to people who prefer a clean and deterministic operating system. FOSS can't really exist on any platform which can't be installed without begging the software vendor first.
If you don't know what I mean by DRM, then check out some general examples of people encountering it:
- https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/activate-mac-after-disk-is-erased/m-p/302298
- https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1fb30py/failed_to_activate_device/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5OOFcnxUKY
Terminals are one area in which the baked-in Apple is specifically weak.
What I've used.
- iTerm2 - pretty good. GUI-based configuration doesn't sit well with me though, but solid offering with a lots of bells and whistles. macos specific
- Wezterm - quite good. GPU-acceleration, works on Linux. LUA-based configuration files. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but learning curve is steepened by overambitious example repos.
- Ghostty. My daily driver. GPU-acceleration, works on Linux (and Windows in future). Simple key-value config files. Pretty impressive for a V1.1 that only came late last year.
Honorable mention as text editor: Zed, which is still in 0.1x level, but is extremely good at being a very simple robust text editor. VS Code, also used, has all the bells and whistles but can be frustratingly slow on big Python projects.
Macports as my primary package manager. Mostly because I started with it. I also use Homebrew to install whatever packages macports does not have.
Honestly, on the command line, in my experience, given the same toolset, a Mac pretty much behaves like a Linux machine. The same FOSS languages, databases, compilers, etc run on it just fine.
From my personal experience in the old days of windows 7-ish, printing a lot of output into a terminal significantly slowed running even otherwise IO/CPU-intensive programs (database batches mostly).
Also it's not only about perceived speed. GPUs *generally* use less power to do what what they do, compared to a CPU.
I mean the GPU is there, why not outsource painting on a screen to it?
The built-in terminal is not bad, but there is an issue with zsh and vi (sometimes if you Ctrl-Z to suspend, the Ctrl-C key stops working). So I searched for alternatives and after iTerm2 hung (taking out all my terminals - never again) I switched to Ghostty, which I first heard of thanks to an earlier article by Liam - thanks Liam!
So I also recommend Ghostty - some warts but no showstoppers and no crashes. I tried a few others - Warp, Alacritty - all too clever. Hated them.
For me macOS is really only let down by two things: a slightly dated command line toolset, solved by installing Homebrew - and the Music app, which is now almost completely unnavigable: Apple UI devs, hang your head in shame. I normally stream to remote speakers so after a lot of false starts (mostly something + mpd) I switched to Lyrion as a network music server, which is very usable.
I'd also like to highlight the good bits of macOS: Time Machine and the Migration Assistant. Both work so well I don't think about them, and that's praiseworthy. But the best thing is: it's just UNIX.
Alacritty - "we don't do tabs"
Warp - dishonorable mention: "we hijack shell completion and substitute our best guesses as to it should be like". "From our cloud AI" or somesuch. Guesses which is, at least my case, were off the mark more often than not. No, no opt out available, been raised as an issue 2 years ago, royally ignored.
Which actually makes me think: how much do influencers, podcasters, reviewers etc that covered Warp with praise actually used it in any advanced fashion? Because any hardened terminal dweller would near instantly hit that as major, major, issue.
If all you do is cat a big text file and see how long that takes, sure, great metric here. Another thing Warp did when I used it is "clump" together output as units. Great in theory, you can copy/paste by just hitting the "clump" somewhere rather than painstakingly dragging the mouse all around. Not so great when you realize that their display is basically a smart head -x | tail -x and you are out of luck if you want to see something in the middle. Might have been fixed since, or possibly I was too clueless and missed something in their UI, but.... grrrrrr.
Horrible forgetfulness...
Kitty was my first GPU terminal from iTerm2. It's quite similar in feature set to Ghostty and Wezterm. Tabbed, GPU, accelerated, etc... The main dev is a tad too opinionated on various things, such as emoji pickers and dislike of tmux. Now, I don't care much for tmux myself, but many people do and not supporting it well is an issue here. Still, a very robust and capable terminal.
FWIW GPU accelerated terminals like Kitty, ghostty and wezterm can also basically "cat" an image to the terminal. Useful if you want to quickly see say an ERD or UML (gasp) diagrams, without leaving the terminal to go to some GUI app.
> For advanced keyboard customization, Karabiner-Elements is very capable, but despite considerable experimentation we've yet to induce it to provide the classic Compose key functionality. If anyone has, do let us know in the comments.
That may be because it’s already baked into MacOS through the ABC Extended keyboard. https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/mac-help/mh27474/mac (the section titled “Use key combinations”)
Option+e = accent grave
Option+~ = accent aigu
Option+u = umlaut
Option+c = cedilla
Etc.
This is not the function you described. Why should I need to know that Option+e means a grave accent? Why does Option+~ give an acute accent instead of a tilde?
When I say type out, I mean Compose + e + ` gives è and Compose + n + ~ gives ñ and Compose + 0 + / gives ∅.
I should be able to type out most international characters from letters and symbols I can already find on the keyboard, not have to learn key combinations off-by-heart.
> I should be able to type out most international characters from letters and symbols I can already find on the keyboard, not have to learn key combinations off-by-heart.
Great. Now please tell me how does that work with several languages as in an international keyboard layout. If compose + o gives you ó, how do you get ö then? I might need both, and quite frequently at that. Or è, é, ę, ě, ñ, ň, ...
The functionality you've linked to is essentially identical to the functionality you're complaining about, the sole difference being the choice of keys for the accent. Whether you find <Compose> <o> <"> or <Option> <u> <o> more useful to create the letter ö probably depends on what you're used to rather than any sort of flawed design. I personally don't find double-quote for diaresis and single-quote for acute particularly intuitive, and some of them - c for cedilla, back-quote for grave - are identical on Linux and macOS
On the other hand, Linux does let you do Compose-p-o-o to make a turd emoji, so whatever floats your boat
I didn't say it was a flawed design, just what a compose key was.
That said, I'd rather use a compose key than try and commit the first or third keyboard to memory.
This works exactly as described by Modicum. I press Option-e, I get an acute accent but the cursor doesn't advance. I then type "e" and I get é, or I type "o" and get ó. I don't know if it's a "compose key", but it sure sounds like one. Multiple diacritics on a single letter? Not that I'm aware of, but then I've never needed one. As for seeing it on the keys, how very 1980s. Keyboard maps are dynamic these days.
>Multiple diacritics on a single letter? Not that I'm aware of, but then I've never needed one.
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I recently suffer Mac, as all the alternatives are currently worse. I too believe better to learn the power in defaults.... than waste life dicking about, generally.
that said, was fairly unsurprised (macs are just like this) that I had to end up forking out for a subscription software to get *mouse scrolling* smooth on an M1. On an allegedly supported peripheral. Anyone got a free for that?
"it just works?
does it fuck!"
(apologies to Bob the Builder)
Switched from 'doze in '09. The MBP is still running, though a little long in the tooth. The more used laptop is a Framework running Fedora.
Back then, it took about a month to train my thumbs to press CMD instead of CTRL.
For Desktop, it's OpenCore. Was Clover back in '18 or so when I got stopped using the MBP as my daily driver. Not sure what a 128GB memory system with 4TB nVME storage and 6TB GPU would cost in MacLand (not to mention the two 28" 4K screens), but don't want to find out. As soon as I can repair a fruity device and add my own storage and memory again, may consider purchasing one, but even though I could afford it, am not prepared to pay their eye-watering prices.
Was tempted to play with Homebrew, but have been compiling code since the 80's, and OSX is Unix based so fairly straight-forward. Bit of a pain the way they lock down the system drive these days but you can always mount it then bless a snapshot if you really need to, which mostly you don't if you just set prefix to /usr/local like any sane 'nix box.
Do not like what they did to /Applications, though, and haven't found a way around it. Don't want to see every single app in one screen. Adobe has a folder, so do the Audio apps, editors, Video, etc. Used to be able to move the native Apple apps to their own folder, alas no more. So, a bash script to just open a finder window straight to the desired folder, and I don't have to see that crap I never run anyway.
Like Mr. Proven, don't use any Mac apps. FF, TB, iTerm, VS Code, Python, LibreOffice are enough to get by. Except for Python, don't compile those, but do give a few bucks to the Document Foundation every month. Don't listen to music on the desktop, it's streaming (mostly either a Swiss classical station, or SOMA FM out of San Francisco, the latter of which also gets a few bucks a month). Tunes are on the phone, which has an ever-growing catalog of purchased discs loaded on to it. No Spotify.
My nVidia Titan XP had to get retired a few years ago; it's in the TrueNas box now. The Titan Black still serves ably, but I don't care for ATI/AMD and have had to tweak things a bit to make it work properly on Ventura. Imagine it's almost time for an OS upgrade again; that's not difficult, just tedious, easier to load onto a fresh disk and use migration assistant to bring all the data back.
I do like the Mac OS, but before too long will have to figure out what to do when Intel support finally goes away. Honestly, though, since I spend so much time either in the editor or the terminal, could probably live without it, just am used to it.
So, after all that, is there a way to get a proper unix-style compose key on MacOS nowadays?
The built-in MacOS key combos are indeed quite clever, but it still lacks provision for many characters that you can type via a compose key (eg, «compose» + xx -> multiplication sign), and some of its choices are somewhat awkward and hard to remember (eg, opt-k -> ˚ (degree symbol) as compared to the more mnemonic «compose» + ^0 (yes, it's like a superscript zero)).
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