We used SF for our support tickets, about 3 years ago we put in a request to allow more than 100 characters in the subject line of emails from tickets. I still get email from SF when other people upvote the request. The oldest request I saw for it was 7 years old. I like to bring this up with the devs from our office who went to work for Sales Force. The just tell me to shut up.

I dunno I just thought Apple stuff would be better in general. I associated them with "ease of use" somehow...well Finder is the nutlow (good alternatives are welcome) and the OS X user experience is generally horrible (imo). Moving stuff from a to b and locating things seems needlessly complicated.
[also maybe I'm superdense but stuff like the dancing icons when moving apps around and how to stop them on the iPad were extremly nonobvious to me]

And tbh I was extremly shocked that I couldn't just hook up my Android via USB. The thought that this wouldn't be possible didn't even occur to me.
And yes to be fair I never tried to connect an iPhone or iPad to my non Apple machine.
My coworker tried to get something from her iPhone to her Mac Book but didn't want to use the Apple-intended sync mechanism (private phone, work laptop) and from what I caught of that this was also nontrivial.

Maybe it's my own fault for not properly classifying people I listened to before as Apple fanboys but words like "easy to use" and "polished"...I wouldn't use those in an Apple context anymore after actually using one of their products. The hardware is shiny and cool but the software is pretty crappy imo
I own a Powerbook G4 and it seemed a lot less complicated to use back in the day (now it's running OpenBSD and rarely used).

/rant#2

I would be genuinely interested in watching someone that useses OS X efficiently for a day. I feel like I'm just missing a ton.

honestly, i'd be using a non-apple phone if i wasn't so used to the font on iOS devices. chrome on android just looks way different than on iOS and it bugs the **** out of me.

Oh and since I'm pretty sure I posted in here to ping me once React Native was available...it is now (I'm sure most are aware since everyone here reads HN)

https://github.com/facebook/react-native

Right before the weekend...excellent timing. I'll play with it.

I'm idly considering getting more into linux and dual booting my macbook since OSX continually annoys me. Is ubuntu still the way to go?

Yeah, the ease of use primarily applies when you have a collection of Apple products playing together in a networked environment. And even then, you can run into some weird hick ups (handover, I'm looking at you.)

Not sure why you're struggling with Finder, care to elaborate?

The dancing icons usually only apply when an app is trying to get your attention (eg. popup activated.) Or maybe you mean other animations?

Transferring data one-way between devices. On iOS that is where the share button comes into play. Should be fairly straight forward what is possible from there on out.

I do like Apple products, not a classic fan boy, though. It sure has drawbacks.

I feel very productive using my collection of products, that much is certain.

on my PC, I dual boot Windows 8 with Linux Mint. I used Windows from the time I was a kid and Mint has the look and feel of Windows, which I like. under the hood, I believe Ubuntu and Mint are both built on top of debian (and I think Mint is even built on top of Ubuntu) so I think you should just go with what you think looks and feels the best for you. I think Mint is the #1 most popular now, having surpassed Ubuntu a few years ago.

I recently got a Mac for work and I absolutely love Mac OS compared to Mint. Mint just kind of has a "free software" kind of feel to it. Windows and Mac OS just feel a bit crisper. it's hard to put my finger on exactly what it is. to me, the bells and whistles of Mac OS make up for the extra flexibility and better package manager on linux.

so I have this crappy little windows 8 laptop that I impulse purchased without looking too carefully at the specs. lo and behold it has a 21 gig harddrive - like half of which is the operating system. my phone has more. in my defense, I've never even heard of such a thing and memory is so cheap it kind of boggles my mind that this machine even exists but anyway I have exactly one thing installed on it, visual studio express 2013 and that has pretty much taken up my entire disk.

lately my whole system has been slowing to a crawl because my virtual memory is eating up all my remaining disk space. so I changed my performance settings so that a pagefile is also created in my external drive, which is pretty fast, and noticed a performance difference pretty soon after.

the thing is I won't always have that drive with me so I don't want to just disable it on C altogether. If I have a pagefile in both C and D for instance, will it prefer to use one or the other or both at the same time depending on what it needs? I have little idea how virtual memory works obviously this just seemed like an easy workaround to my dumb situation that I got myself into.

Maybe it's more "wiggly icons"? Tap icon to move around between windows. All icons were wiggling/dancing and I actually had to Google how to make them stop :P

Finder...I can't really say what it is. Navigating around and copying/moving files just seems unintuitive to me. I sometimes resort to dragging stuff off to the desktop because dragging through multiple hirachies is strange (folders opening seems sloppy)...I dunno I think I'll make some videos of my struggles in Macland some day to be analyzed by someone that actually understands how stuff is supposed to work.
Iirc there is no right click to start a simple text file (is there a shortcut to cut stuff...something like that was missing as well)...just random stuff.

Overall I feel like my biggest productivity bottleneck is not understanding how you're supposed to switch between windows efficiently. I can alt-tab around, the clear everything from desktop gesture only works 30% of the time and AFAIK there is no shortcut for that.
But then to switch between windows in an application it's cmd+"<"...I dunno I feel like I manually minimize windows way too much to get to stuff that is behind.

As a closet windows fan Mint looks really good, thanks.

Only downside of Mint was that it had issues with upgrades a while back (last time I looked at it). Otherwise I've only heard good things. My guess is those are solved by now but might be wise to check.

Arch is what the cool kids use these days, I use Xubuntu on all my non Apple hardware.

Elementary OS is the most beautiful Linux imo. Some would say that it has a Mac vibe, but I refuse to believe it.

How about a 32gb thumb drive you can always take with you?

Or maybe buy another hdd for like forty bucks? Should get you about a terabyte these days (sorry, forty one bucks)

Image the current drive to a partition on the new one and either set up another partition for storage or extend the partition with windoze

I like unity.

It just werks.

I'm still a fan of Kubuntu

off to an awesome start, when I try to make a partition osx errors out (with something that doesn't give good results on google) and then I can't delete it. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

SF seems like over-kill for ticket tracking. Was there nothing else available back then?

The shipping software we use has character limits on the name field, which often includes first, middle, last, and c/o information, limits on address fields, and limits on city names. I have no idea why they refuse to change this.

I take it you also work for a low-class company that SF could care less about?

not sure what's up with that, but I recommend leaving about 15% of storage for each OS and then having a shared partition of the other 70% where you put all your documents and that sort of thing. this may not be as necessary for Mac as it is for Windows. Windows doesn't like being collocated so it refuses to acknowledge the existence of a linux OS.

Apple's secure format is broken too and makes me wonder if government was like get rid of it because it used to work and no fix.

@clowntable developing on OS X for android is usually plug in and it works.
Only time i've had issues with drivers for phones was on Windows but simple to solve by finding them at whatever website.

That sucks though that tethering is broken.

Grue,

Are you trying to install linux onto your macbook? Have you tried following this?
http://www.howtogeek.com/187410/how-...inux-on-a-mac/

I currently have Windows 8.1 installed via bootcamp. Going to delete it after this semester is over and probably dual boot linux.

Clowntable,

I also share your same hatred for finder on mac. It's not as intuitive as it is on Windows. Why can't we use the return keys to go into a folder or open a file??? It has to be (command + down) to go into a folder. Hitting return lets you rename a file/folder. Super annoying. Also it doesn't show it's full directory path like it does on windows.

Home folder hidden by default. Default finder window shows all files. Both if those drive me insane when I have to use finder for something.

Better alternative to finder is terminal

I also hate installing applications on OS X. Some get it right and make it a one click deal. But then there's most of the time where double clicking the package just shows the application and to actually install you have to drag to the application folder which may or may not have a shortcut provided for you.

I don't mind that for installing applications.

What really grinds my gears is when you want uninstall and you do so by deleting the application because there is no uninstaller.

Which leaves folders and files left behind somewhere on the system and I'm extremely anal about having a clean as can be system.

Maybe I am bad at MacOSX, but whenever I try to search for a file in Finder, it defaults to searching all my files instead of the folder I am in. Of course this usually stalls the computer in an annoying way until I can click the appropriate folder to search.