True?

pettend@lemmy.world to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 582 points –
71

You are viewing a single comment

Macs excel in multimedia creation. It’s not just a cool setup. Yes, I’m prepared for the inevitable downvotes.

Yeah, more software was written for the more user-friendly computers with the (generally) less-technical userbase.

Yeah, the people at Pixar have no clue how to use a computer. Lol

In all seriousness, even the same media software, like Pro Tools, is more versatile on Mac than on Windows. I can say that with first-hand experience.

The “dumbed-down” Apple device is the iPhone. You get admin privileges on MacOS like a big boy. You can use bash or zsh commands in Terminal all you want.

You get admin privileges on MacOS like a big boy. You can use bash or zsh commands in Terminal all you want.

Cool. So try updating to a version of Bash from the last 15 years, because the pre-installed one is Bash 3, because Bash 4 and 5 are under the GPLv3 license, which Apple won't comply with.

...ah, no, you can't update the pre-installed Bash, because it's on a section of the file system that is read-only even with admin access. You can install Bash 5 as a separate shell, and use that as your default terminal shell, but any scripts written with the standard #!/bin/bash instead of the more flexible #!/usr/bin/env bash will still use Bash 3.

This "handholding" (or really, a safety net) is arguably a good thing, or at least a positive tradeoff; but you can't claim it doesn't exist.

I agree it’s not as limitless as Linux, but there’s plenty of room for advanced users.

I’ve never needed to use a newer version of Bash. What is an example of something one couldn’t do with Bash 3 or zsh?

I get that this is an Apples to Oranges comparison, but Powershell 7 is way easier to use than the default Windows Powershell because of autocomplete. I imagine that newer versions of Bash have made improvements that are similarly powerful.

Oh, gotcha. I thought you were talking about limitations, not features. My misunderstanding.

It's not so much a problem of there being things you "can't do" in other shells or older Bash, as that it breaks existing shell scripts, which is frustrating.

I'm not sure what you mean. I have updated bash with a single homebrew command.

The poster you're replying to was not referring to 3rd party software in user space.

Ok, yeah, I can see that there would be times this could matter but like 90% of the time this wouldn't have mattered for my use case afaik. I didn't realize you couldn't backup the old copy in /bin and symlink to the brew one from there. In fact I thought I did do that long ago.

If it's anything like when I used a Mac regularly 7y ago, Homebrew doesn't install to /bin, it installs to /usr/local/bin, which only works for scripts that use env in their shell "marker" (if you don't call it directly with the shell). You're just putting a higher bash in the path, not truly updating the one that comes with the system.

That's mostly still true, with the small caveat that the default prefix on arm64 macOS is /opt/homebrew rather than /usr/local, so you might have to add it explicitly to your PATH

Oh thank goodness, that was one of my main complaints with the system. Did they ever get around to requiring sudo like Macports (and any other reasonable system level packages manager on BSD/Linux)?

Did you read the linked Q&A?

What do you get if you run /bin/bash --version?

1 more...
1 more...
2 more...

Yeah, the people at Pixar have no clue how to use a computer. Lol

Do you really expect their artists to be IT experts? You seem to be stuck in the early 90s mindset when "knowing how to use a computer" covered all disciplines.

Did you miss the word "generally?"

Having a familiar console is nice, but you still can't truly tinker with all the nuts and bolts.

Sure you can. You can even override the T2 chip in Recovery Mode. The thing I miss on an Apple Silicon Mac is installing Windows. It was a big downside for me, so I held onto my Intel Mac until a few years ago. I used to have a tri-boot Mac Pro running Snow Leopard/Windows XP/Red Hat. Then I downgraded to an Intel iMac with macOS/Windows before my M2. I do miss the versatility of Intel Macs.

they actually use linux for render

Weren't they the guys who made Gimp to Gimp Studio or something like that?

2 more...
2 more...

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

What’s interesting is the Apple CoreAudio system on iOS and macOS is as good as it is from their experience developing the iPod. For years after the iPod was discontinued, audiophiles were paying top dollar for used iPod Classics, just for the high quality DAC. The low-latency and high quality of CoreAudio is one of the reasons Pro Tools works better on Mac than on Windows.

Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.

Do yourself a favor and swap the battery when you do the storage. The most challenging part of the job is carefully prying apart the housing without causing cosmetic damage.

2 more...