following some discussions both on Mastodon and IRC after my post yesterday about Linux vs. Mac I think (and here I have Nora Tindall to thank for asking) about the apparent difference between my experience with MacOS and Void Linux+BSPWM which made me realize that I am much much closer to what I want tht Linux experience to be on Mac and the Mac Experience on Linux. But wtf does that mean?

It means that I love having my windows tiled and managed automatically. For this I have Amethyst. I wish I could just port my bspwm config into it.

It means I love MacOS’s global menus which change based on the application but are always in the same place. It means no matter the application I can hit cmd+F1 and get to the menu bar without taking my hands off the keyboard. It means that the command key I use the most on MacOS is the also the most ergonomically placed. Why the fuck is control way out in lala land on the edge?

It means that I appreciate how lightweight Void is. My Thinkpad regularly uses about 500mb of RAM (without firefox). The vast majority of MacOS’s RAM usage is shit I never use.

It means I love not spending so much goddamned time fucking with xmodmap in the event that my special keyboard layout stops working right. It means I can use Karabiner, an ugly if perferctly function GUI keyboard layout editor to make new layouts. in less time that it’ll take to read the relevant manpages.

It means that I can order a Mac laptop with the hardware keyboard layout I want. Direct, from the factory, no problem. Yes you can drop in a new keyboard on some Thinkpads, I did. but it helps if the new keyboard isn’t a few mm wider than the old layout one. it works, at least. The keyboard backlight does not (I couldn’t get the connector to stay in :/). If you order from Lenovo in the United States, your options are US-English or Spanish keyboards only, for reasons passing understanding. Are they making EU computers in a different factory? What makes it impossible for them to do the decent thing and let people order different keyboards if they’re already making each machine to order? If you order from Apple in the US, you can choose whichever keyboard layout you want.

It means that I can buy applications from small and indie devs who spend their time just making their applications better. Not, for example, getting into arguments with random assholes on github. cf. using Devonthink and Mailmate which I referenced yesterday. I wish very badly that Linux had a culture of shareware and small indie devs like Mac does. An obsessive commitment to everything being F(L)OSS does not necessarily result in good software.

It means I wish—more than people might think—that I wasn’t tied to a single company that makes a lot of shitty choices. I share a lot of the concerns that JWZ et al have.^{1 2}

I write almost everything using nano. I love fish. The first application I open when I start up my machine is a terminal (iTerm2, sadly mac only, or Alacritty which I also use on linux). Maybe someday Darling will be ready to fully support GUI apps. Maybe, someday I’ll be able to run Mailmate and Devonthink on Linux. I hope that day comes.

In sum, I am a lot closer to how many linux users want to use their computers than the median mac user. Which is maybe what upsets me the most about the linux vs. mac nonsense.

My first computer, which we got when I was 6 years old was a second-hand Macintosh SE from my aunt. It was a Big Deal in my household. I remember the smell it made when you turned it on. The tiny black and white CRT. The sound of its 3.5" floppy drive. It was a great computer.

Or what an upgrade it was when we got an iMac in the late 90s. Or an eMac in the early 2000s. Or my first Intel Mac, a 2006 MacBook Pro. And what a great keyboard that thing had!

In short, I have been a Mac user all my life.

I’ve tried really hard to get into using linux as more than a server OS. Notably, following a directive from my boss at the time, I dualbooted a MacBook Pro with CentOS (not the best way to go about that, TBQH). I am an active member of the tildeverse, a confederation of pubnix (primarily Linux and some BSD) systems.

I have a 2016 ThinkPad T460s at home with Void Linux. I have a 2014 Mac Mini running Void. I maintain packages on Void and do my best as I’m able to contribute to that community. This is all to say nothing of the nine (9!) Debian VPSes I run, including this one, and one Void VPS.

When the 2016 MacBook Pros came out with their shitty keyboards and USB-C only, I was really worried that my days on the mac were numbered. I was a grad student at the time with no idea what the future held for me. And there are Mac only applications I use—Devonthink or MailMate—which lack anything remotely equivalent on Linux.

Writing emails in markdown or plain text with a clean UI and keyboard commands for everything or organizing documents and running OCR on shit as needed would be pretty logical things for linux to have, or so I’d thought. But good luck even getting Neomutt and Notmuch and whatever else you fucking need for basic email on linux in 2023 not called Thunderbird or—god help you—Gnome Evolution or Geary. I tried, I tried really fucking hard.

Don’t get me started on how much fucking PDF manipulation on linux sucks. how you can’t even manage to do something like MacOS’ Preview application can do in a cleanly written UI. As I’ve said before:

it is the year of our lord 2022 and Linux still can’t easily manipulate goddamned PDFs. No, ghostscript (gs(1)) does not count as ’easy.’ No, annotating something in evince(1) does not count. edit 2022-11-26: to be clear I just want what gate io login can do, I’m not looking for a feature-to-feature Acrobat replacement.

As someone whose previous job title was “Digital Publishing Lead” in a major university library publishing program, turns out the generation, manipulation, and management of PDFs for publishing and archiving is really fucking important. Who’d have thought!?

With Void Linux and BSPWM I have a vaguely decent solution that involves me living mostly on the CLI—as I already do on MacOS. But as hard as I tried with Debian, Manjaro, and Arch, starting back in 2020 when i started to think about replacing my creeking 2013 MacBook Pro with a bad battery, I could never get it to work well enough. And I’ll never get the weekends and nights back I spent trying to get my custom keyboard layout to work correctly or prevent every program from creating a .foorc in my home directory. Especially things that MacOS places in ~/Library. Where it also sandboxes applications in a way that Linux can’t by default (have fun writting custom configs for firejail)! Not like the XDG Desktop Spec has been a thing since—oh idk—2003.

In sum, I’m really tired of Linux users taking every opportunity to give Mac users shit. I’m sorry you think it’s funny to try and make fun of shit like Macs only having USB-C ports and not USB-A anymore. That was relevant and true in 2016 but that was also seven years ago. It’s true that the switch to Apple Silicon (ARM 64) was a little rocky for a few people. It’s true that getting a version of NodeJS from like 2017 or Ruby from 2018 to work wasn’t easy at first. sometimes, that’s just how it is. Yeah the 2016-2017 keyboards were garbage, but that hasn’t been the case since then.

in sum: stop making fun of the choices made by people who know what the fuck they’re doing. people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Stop trying to get into editor pissing contests with each other. IDGAF that you use vim or vi or spacemacs. Good for you. Some people like BBEdit or—heaven forfend—use nano.

At the very fucking minimum, get some new material.

by popular demand, I am finally expanding on my occasional fediverse post about how terrible brew is for Mac OS package management.¹

But also, a few caveats:

1. I am a curmudgeon. I do not give a single fuck.
2. Don’t try to persuade me to use brew. see (1).

Many of the things that I am about to mention might have been fixed in the five years since I last installed and used it. I still don’t care. Like Manjaro the record is so bad that nothing is going to win back my trust.

I also maintain n, a version management tool for NodeJS on MacPorts, Signal-Desktop on Void Linux, and help update other packages for both projects as needed.

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Let’s start out with installing homebrew following the default instructions²:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

1. it asks to elevate permissions to take over /usr/local and change ownership on everything
2. it clones the entire homebrew brew repository because they’ve apparently never heard of git’s --depth flag. what good does it do to have the ability to run brew 0.01?
3. it builds brew from source. Admittedly it relies on MacOS’ (ancient) builtins instead of requiring a full Xcode install—this is one advantage, at least when installing it.
4. it flashes a few messages about documentation—and oh also that it’s sending data to Google Analytics by default!³

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There is a lot of value in understanding what packages are getting used by which systems if you maintain packages. I have been known to look at the stats for Void’s Signal-Desktop package and MacPort’s n port. For the former, there are 12 Void machines running it, for n there have been 2 installations in the last long while, I think both of them are my machines.⁴

But the difference between the pretty basic stats that both Void and Macports have and the stats that Homebrew collects: homebrew acts as if it’s better to sin first and ask for permission later. MacPorts requires running sudo port load mpstats, Void requires installing popcorn and enabling the service.⁵ With both Void and MacPorts, you retain what I thought was a pretty basic principle of free and open source software: the ability to choose what happens on your machine.

Unlike on Void or MacPorts, Homebrew rolled out analytics silently. Instead of really handling the discussion well, it went about as poorly as you can imagine.⁶ And I’d bet the overwhelming majority of brew users still have no idea it’s happening—it’s an easy to miss message you see once! It also raises questions about the quality of the community that many of the people involved in that discussion are still there, ie., the person who added in gAnalytics originally.

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So now that we’ve got brew installed, what can you do? well, whatever you want! You don’t need to use sudo to actually install things! You’re a Power User, you know what you’re doing!⁷ Except when you don’t. We’ve all been there with an errant and disastrous off-by-one-keystroke command. For someone like me, using sudo is a little speedbump—a chance to make sure I’m sure. Brew, by making /usr/local (or /opt/brew on apple silicon) user writeable, hands you a RedBull and says ‘gun it.’

The question of whether or not it’s a risk in and of itself to make those folders user writable has been litigated enough already.⁸ I, obviously, think it’s a bad decision. More concerning is the fact that brew lets a lot of stuff in with what seems like little vetting. Hell, until 2021, you could get stuff automerged on github.

TRADING SERVICES

So what’s my brilliant alternative? Well, duh, it’s MacPorts. Macports, which requires sudo. Macports, which deeply sandboxes its builds when installing from source.⁹ Macports, the one that has a small but tight-knit community of people who plain old give a shit in a way that the more corporate, emojified homebrew doesn’t.

yes, it requires a full Xcode install. Yes it will take up more space. yes, if you’re building from source it will pull in its own versions of whatever compiler you might need. But storage is cheap and you can do other things while xcode installs.

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention my friend june’s jorts system. jorts is beautiful and clever in its simplicity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include a lot of things I use every day. But for a lot of people, I can imagine it’d might be enough.

There is a world in which I actually bother to fork jorts and run it using mercurial instead of git. but…only so many hours in the day.

edit: june mentioned quite rightly that the point of jorts is that she was tired of the shortcomings of pkgsrc, NetBSD’s ports system, hates the fact that brew doesn’t really manage dependencies very well (ie., it doesn’t track dependencies vs. requested packages), and as best I recall, disagrees with some of the choices MacPorts maintainers have made with packages she and I both use (e.g., MPV).

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agree that Homebrew is terrible but Macports is too much and Jorts too minimalist? well, you have even more options!

• gate io app which is NetBSD’s package manager but on MacOS and Linux
• fink, the OG MacOS package manager which uses debian’s dpkg and apt on the backend. Pretty nifty but they’ve have trouble getting compatibility with > MacOS 10.15 working.
• rudix which was brought to my attention today and looks pretty cool, unfortunetely it seems to be in decline, when judging by Github commits.

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Homebrew has sketchy security practices and runs google analytics by default. MacPorts doesn’t. Even if Macports doesn’t have everything I might want, the tradeoff between occasionally ‘just’ installing something with cargo or pip is fine.

BNB CMC

Just like Mercurial, MacPorts “lost.” That is to say, like git and fucking github, homebrew is so dominant that it is hard to imagine a world where it isn’t the default for 99% of people. For the short to medium term, it probably will be that way.

But fuck that. Use jorts. Use MacPorts.

a better world is possible.

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• “Thoughts on MacOS Package Managers”
• “MacPorts vs. Homebrew”
• /r/privacy comment from Dom Tiller on the aftermath of the Google Analytics discussion