@lproven on how we lost more advanced #computers:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/98868.html

"So we went backwards. [...] Out went multiple different purpose-built OSes for different purposes and platforms. Out went using the best language for the job and the best platform and OS for the job. And out went #GUI-only OSes.

Instead, in came the lowest-common-denominator, stupidest, simplest, but !!FREE!! #OS that could with a tonne of work do everything.

[...]

1980s computers were all amazing and very cool.

1990s ones turned into boring beige boxes, as dull as staplers, but there were occasional flashes of brilliance - most of which you couldn't afford.

Then by the 2000s nothing was left but staplers. It's all just office equipment now.

Devices like modern phones and the #ReMarkable make me want to cry, they are so stupid and so clunky.

[...]

I watched my chosen field go from bold and innovative to a sad bunch of efforts to polish turds. It is heartbreaking."

#macOS #Windows #Linux #UNIX

“Apple should end their prohibition on shapes in MacOS app icons”

There's a lot you can say about macOS, but one thing Apple used to be incredibly good at were making beautifully crafted, detailed icons. As with almost every other aspect of macOS, this deteriorated sharply over the years, with the recent macOS releases with Liquid Glass being an absolute low point. Not o

https://www.osnews.com/story/145403/apple-should-end-their-prohibition-on-shapes-in-macos-app-icons/

#macOS

@ChuckMcManis Don't make me roll the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

#TLDW:
If #SysVinit wasn't slow dogshit and never designed with changing systems, configurability and speed in mind, it would've remained.
The inability or unwillingness to fix SysVinit was the reason #SystemD was concieved, which TBH is just @pid_eins "plagiarizing" [the concept of] #LaunchD from #macOS which #FreeBSD fans seem to love whilst hating SystemD.

@nixCraft

#NeXT / #Apple had the right idea.

* User homes are in /Users

* Each app is in /Applications and looks like a regular file but is actually a folder (i.e. you can cd into it and examine the contents)

* The operating system is in /System

* Files shared among apps (except files that come with the OS), including configuration files, are in /Library

* Static libraries, debug info, C headers, OS API reference docs, etc go in /Developer

#macOS #MacOSX #NeXTSTEP #Linux #Unix #BSD

I saw this and my first though was 'Come on! The #Almquist shell has never been ported to #macOS before 2026⁈ It must have been there since the #NeXTStep days, surely. Someone has simply not known about it because xe never thought to look up the name Almquist.'

https://github.com/dotike/fsh

So I went looking.

Mad as it may seem, from what I've found so far, an Almquist shell on macOS does not turn up before 2025.

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/dash-shell

Nary a mention of Almquist on Apple StackExchange.

It looks like macOS went straight from the C shell on NeXTStep to the Bourne Again shell.

But macOS has had a Korn shell for decades, right?

#UnixShells

A tale of two path separators

In macOS, you can apparently create files and directories in the Finder with names that include slashes. If you then go into the terminal and take a look with ls, you'll see that the slashes are actually colons.

I don’t understand all the nuances, but I know this is a side-effect of the fact that macOS has not one but two path separators: the slash (/) and the colon (:). The

https://www.osnews.com/story/145356/a-tale-of-two-path-separators/

#macOS

Just read that #MacOS #Tahoe is the last one that will support Intel-based #macs, and it only supports some 2019-2020 models.

So that means that #Apple is targeting six or maybe seven years of hardware support.

That's an e-waste empire, guys.

Alt...

A ginger tabby cat looking down at us, saying "Pathetic."

A few months ago, I set myself a simple goal: understand the operating systems I use.

The journey has been fun, but there’s always a bit of fiction along the way.

Spend a week deep in the #FreeBSD world, then switch back to #MacOS or #Arch, and you quickly realize how much your own muscle memory slows you down.

So I built and open-sourced UPKG:

https://github.com/seuros/upkg

UPKG gives you a single package management command across operating systems.

It doesn’t replace the native package manager. It simply provides a consistent interface so you can use the same commands everywhere.

On macOS, it can completely replace Brew.

If you’re thinking about moving to BSD, install UPKG first. Get comfortable with the syntax, then when yo a’re ready, drop the 'u' and use pkg directly. Or keep using UPKG if you prefer.

PS: Nothing here is vibe-coded. I read the source code of every target package manager and wrote a proper wrapper around them.

My MBP M1 Tahoe is almost freezing daily. Unuseably slow. Can't figure out why.

If I run any of the stats monitoring tools I know, CPU and memory seem to be fine. Same with drive space.

Appears to be something to do with the filesystem. Open apps run fine, until they try to do something like spawn a terminal instance, or try to retrieve a list of files.

Too many files open? Failing drive?

Ideas?

#macOS

wow, `fd -x` (or -X) on #macOS is _bonkers_ faster than `find | xargs`

Great way to clean down your ~/Library cruft

#moderntooling

is there someone on here who uses #pkgsrc with #macos ?

i can download #alacritty with pkgsrc now, but the version it installs for macos doesn't seem to be the version i can download from github -- it isn't installed to /Applications and has to be bootstrapped via Terminal.app to run.

are there any clever/simple ways to rig this up? am i missing something obvious?

Quick update on @siracusa's Hyperspace for #macOS; it saved me nearly 4TB of drive space on one 20TB drive. It did take a while, but that's fine!

I have it grinding away on another to see what it can do there.

Alt...

Screenshot of Hyperspace, showing: Scanned Files 237,691 Scanned Folders 44,862 Scan Errors 1 View Scan Time 54:47:11 Potential Savings- Eligible Files 0 Reclaimed Files 55,940 Reclamation Errors- Reclaim Time 108:39:41 Reclaimed Space 3.94 TB Reclaimed 3.94 TB

MacOS 27 drops Intel support, will be last release with Rosetta 2

With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple's desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all In

https://www.osnews.com/story/145279/macos-27-drops-intel-support-will-be-last-release-with-rosetta-2/

#macOS

Want strict guidelines on designing very Mac-assed apps so you don’t end up just shipping a stretched out iPad app?

Check out the Mario HIG for Macintosh apps. Make your apps Macintosh AF!!!

Get some strict guidelines on making sidebars, toolbars, layouts (especially those for Settings), and Inspectors!!!

All this is free too.

But if you feed my HIG into some LLM, don’t tell me about it. I don’t want or need to know.

Happy Coding!

#macos #macintosh #appkit #swiftui

https://marioaguzman.github.io/design/

@mjack

Sort of. Folk wisdom has #macOS derived from #FreeBSD. But actually XNU is a descendent of #NeXTSTEP. Both FreeBSD and NeXTSTEP were derived from from BSD, but not from *exactly* the same point in its evolution and neither from the other.

And of course they diverged from each other.

But you can, say, pull up an old iOS manual page and see it saying 'BSD' at the head, compare it with the same page from FreeBSD, and contrast it with #Debian and #Illumos:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/System/Conceptual/ManPages_iPhoneOS/man3/tzset.3.html

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tzset&sektion=3

https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=tzset&section=3

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/manpages-dev/tzset.3.en.html

https://illumos.org/man/3C/tzset

*BSD virtual machines on MacBook Pro M2 with UTM.

These are setup for command-line usage only, like servers. The operating system icons were available under settings for each machine, a nice touch!

Does macOS count as *BSD, in the grand scheme of things?

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #UTM #macOS

Alt...

Screen shot of UTM in MacOS, showing OpenBSD 7.9 and FreeBSD 15.0 machines

In today's MacOS struggles: apparently you cannot change the default email handler without opening Mail.app and changing settings.

But there's a problem. When you open Mail.app you cannot access settings without first adding an email account. Which I stubbornly don't want to do because I don't want to use Mail.app _at all_. I don't use the big providers, and don't want to connect it to my iCloud.

Aggravating. I'm sure there's an arcane way (there always is).

#macos

Ran @siracusa's Hyperspace on one drive; it should save 3.9TB, running the reclaim now. Let's see what happens. <clicks Reclaim Space>
#macOS

Alt...

Screenshot from Hyperspace showing: Scanned Files 237,691. Scanned Folders 44,862. Scan Errors 1 View. Scan Time 54:47:11. Potential Savings 3.94 TB.

It's finally time to try #MacOS on my old 2012 Mac Mini.

Can somneone explain me this?

On #MacOS's Save File dialog, if a file with a `:` already exists, the colon is replaced by `/` in the file listing.

And if I want to write a filename with a `: `, the text input changes it to `-`!

Copying Remote Command Output to Your macOS Clipboard

A small trick to copy command output from a remote ssh session directly into the local macOS clipboard, using OSC 52 and a tiny shell script.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/05/26/copying-remote-command-output-to-your-macos-clipboard/

#ITNotes #macOS #Mac #Apple #shell #ssh #Linux #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #illumos #Terminal #Clipboard

Ladies and germs, @bbedit 16.0 is out! I repeat: #BBEdit 16.0 has been released.

Update and/or purchase accordingly. This app has been a daily-driver for me since 1994 or ’95. #TextEditors #HTML #CSS #macOS https://www.barebones.com

Alt...

BBEdit’s macOS app icon — a large letter B set against a checked-diamond with a wrap-around checked bar

So the new #macOS update is to enable #Apple to make money by shoving ads in maps and to enable Apple to make money by hiking subscriptions in the App Store?

Let me just rush off and install that bad boy.

How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Setting

https://www.osnews.com/story/144876/how-fast-is-a-macos-vm-and-how-small-could-it-be/

#macOS

Have a #ThinkPad running #OpenBSD and #Xfce look like #macOS: I stole someone else's font rendering trick and lost time doing this.

Alt...

An Xfce session screenshot. A Librewolf instance is visible side to side with a Thunar window and an Alacritty one. The terminal runs htop and fastfetch.

I'm considering bumping the macOS requirements for my binary package repository available at https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/ again.

There's already a bunch of packages missing because they have newer C++ requirements than Xcode 15.4 supports.

What OS are folks running?

#pkgsrc #macos