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macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies (jeffgeerling.com)
98 points by kencausey 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 159 comments



It took me a long time to put my finger on why I like MS Windows. I've used multiple platforms, but rarely interact with the OS. Most of my time is spent inside apps, and even while coding, I'm using languages and tools that are fairly platform-agnostic. And the UI qualities of the platforms are increasingly overridden by the seemingly random UI designs of apps.

Then it recently dawned on me: The file explorer. It's the one OS app that I use regularly, and it "just works" with a good enough layout and robust file operations.


Many of the Linux file managers aren't great either, and sometimes fail at things I'd consider basic.

Dolphin doesn't always measure a remote FS space correctly. You have 10TB free, but it sees 0 and a 10MB file copy throws ERRNOSPC.

GVFS for non-local systems in Nautilus or Thunar is sometimes quirky too, although I haven't had any issues in a while, so either I'm used to working around the quirks or they were resolved.


Dolphin isn't perfect but if Finder worked as well as it I'd be so happy.

But not the KDE file save dialog, that thing's as frustrating as macOS's.


Which remote FS? We regularly work with NFS without any problems.


In the last case I'm thinking of, it is Xrdp's fuse mount.

I would be willing to blame Xrdp, but Thunar works just fine side by side with the same file at the same time.

Also kind of interesting was that Dolphin's status bar shows a different free space amount than Dolphin's properties window.


The title could have just been "macOS Finder is still bad"

Yes. Yes it is.


explorer is the exact reason I used Windows exclusively for decades. that, and having the Address input bar in the taskbar so i could rapidly type out and access folders.

then Windows 11 decided to remove that feature for absolutely zero reason.


> absolutely zero reason

A prevailing theory is that advanced users opt out of telemetry, where as regular users don't. So Microsoft has no idea what advanced users use and the OS gradually becomes less sophisticated.


I guess similar issue with Safari not showing the url path by default, which is completely ridiculous. It is a large part of the UX. It is not going to be of benefit to anyone.


Chrome also hides things in the url that might confuse us helpless users[1], I think they made that terrible UI change before Safari followed them off the cliff. Another reason to use FF.

1: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/25855505/how-to-mak...


It wasn't available during the first releases of the File Explorer rewrite, however it has been made available for quite some months now.


I still edit the address bar in Windows 11 file explorer all the time. Do I have a setting turned on to enable this without realizing it?


Yeah thats "Display the full path in the title bar" in folder options (where show hidden files and show extensions is at)

Otherwise the path becomes clickable buttons... which is nice sometimes when you're going back a few directories as you can just click any parent to get a list of it's siblings drop-down style.

My favorite feature is just typing cmd into the title bar which launches it at the current directory.


That used to be the case for me, but the Explorer right-click changes in Win11 are insane.

It only shows the common options (i.e. the ones where you would use a keyboard shortcut rather than mouse), hiding anything you might actually have wanted.

Even for less skilled users, mixing horizontal/vertical icons got me a confused tech support call from my elderly father.


It's definitely bad the default was changed, but you can hold shift to get the old menu back and I believe you can make a registry change to get the old one back permanently


They are currently going pretty hard into breaking the file explorer in Windows 11. Massive latency increases and tons of weird bugs in controls.


Each new version of old things in windows increase latency.

CMD.exe is still their fastest terminal (even though it sucks on anything else).


macos finder is still bad at everything. it organizes the icon view without grid support so things will be spaced weird and go off the screen. it doesn't tell you how fast files are transferring. shift click to select a series of files doesn't work in icon mode. enter doesn't open the folder. there is only a back button and not a go up directory button and these are just the things i could immediately remember with 10 seconds of thought.


You forgot the lovely thing that is .DS_Store, which ends up everywhere your machine visits on the network.


Apple has a silly default enabled that causes that issue—the best thing is to disable it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102064


Silly defaults are why I got rid of my Macbook. I just can't tread the water.

Put on your headphones... Apple Music launches. Save files to a certain directory, and it's a tacit request to put it in iCloud. Mouse acceleration is default, disabling it is as easy as a terminal command though (or a third-party tweaking tool). Safari will send nag notifications, but only if you don't disable it. Leaving iCloud alone will add a bright red (1) balloon to your Settings app for no reason; probably for the best. Disable Crash Reporter, disable telemetry, disable the program terminator, disable the sleep image, disable OCSP and Gatekeeper... on top of all that, I still disable automatic updates since Apple cannot be trusted to maintain basic functionality between minor updates.

In all my time on MacOS, the only piece of compelling software I found was iTerm2. Which is a shame, since I don't use MacOS for terminal stuff besides SSH anyways.


Boy if iCloud defaults annoy you, wait until you see recent versions of Windows.

By default they put your entire desktop folder, documents folder, etc. as children folders of the OneDrive folder now.

It's absolutely infuriating


Yep - I dropped Windows 10 like the hot garbage it was. I suffered through Windows 8 expecting that things might turn around, and even on the insider builds it consistently felt like Windows was an ad delivery platform. I was disappointed to watch Apple fumble their opportunity to make OSX the true Windows-killer.

Now that I daily-drive Linux, I don't log-on to Windows or Mac systems without a deposit for the troubles. I truly feel bad looking out at the modern landscape of mainstream operating systems. It's no wonder most people feel trapped by modern technology.


That’s a feature, though. My parents, our CEo, etc. never lose a file. And if they get a new device everything just shows up on the new device. It’s sort of magical, actually.


Resource forks are worse than that. Any non-Apple filesystem you work on gets littered with ._ files and archives get __MACOSX folders too. Mac OS leave a lot of detritus in its wake.


Apple's equivalent of the "sent from my Blackberry" email signatures of yore.


You forgot the lovely thing that is .DS_Store, which ends up everywhere your machine visits on the network.

No worse than Windows spewing thumbs.db files all over the place. Or any of the thousands of different dot files that end up in Linux volumes.


dotfiles live in your home directory almost exclusively.

Literally there’s no tooling I know of that will drop random hidden files.

The ext4 filesystem does have a special hidden directory for data partially recovered/corrupted


On that note, ZFS has a hidden ".zfs" directory for accessing filesystem snapshots.

That works with ZFS shared over the network (samba, etc) too, which can be useful. :)


I quite literally do not know a single filesystem that creates dotfiles outside of the volume root directory, besides APFS. It is both worse and unique relative to modern operating systems.


i must have missed the part of nautilus or dolphin where they put a dot file in every directory you navigate to.


Does Windows still make that file? I built a new PC a few years ago and don't recall disabling it (Win10).


They're gone since Vista (2007), I think. Widows now stores thumbnails in the user profile folder. But the stigma lives on.


I think it’s only present if Explorer needs to store a preview for a folder or file.


File browsing has been a solved problem since Windows XP. I hate that Finder doesn't provide a button in its UI to go one level up (instead I have to use cmd+up). The fact that it hides the actual drives makes me think that this is all intentional to have users unlearn (or not learn, if young) how HDs work and bill for that juicy cloud storage.


>The fact that it hides the actual drives makes me think that this is all intentional to have users unlearn (or not learn, if young) how HDs work and bill for that juicy cloud storage.

Isn't that just the standard nix filesystem view abstraction leaking into the rest of the OS? Your file system could be any number of drives (or no drives at all) mounted at arbitrary points. Showing them like they are any relevant place to start for most users seems silly. Especially given that in a modern nix OS, almost everything in the top level of `/` is useless to users.


imagine the 'most users' of Apple products trying to decipher this comment—which was essentially frozenlettuce's point.


>The fact that it hides the actual drives makes me think that this is all intentional

It definitely is intentional, and for good reason[1].

[1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...


Try long clicking the window title/icon, it'll reveal the tree and you can traverse up it.


Oops, actually meant rigiht click.


Windows XP explorer didn’t even have tabs.

Also, macOS shows external drives on the Desktop and the Finder sidebar by default. The basis for your conspiracy theory is just plain false.


“The fact that [??] hides the actual drives makes me think that this is all intentional to have users unlearn (or not learn, if young) how HDs work and bill for that juicy cloud storage.”

Are you talking about Mac or Windows?

Windows has those shortcuts which backtrack only to MyPC, and they’ve done that since forever. Always infuriated me as a Mac user since I am both user and Admin to get stuck in one of these loops, when I needed to get to root.


My PC -> C:/ is the easiest method I've found.

I always find it very fursting to get back to my user folder too without being stuck inside my documents or my downloads. End up adding a shortcut to the navigation panel for it.


Don’t forget selecting multiple files, right clicking to check infos to know how much the total weight. Enjoy


I can see an argument for the default behavior (though I would want the combined info too). But in case you or any other reader doesn’t know, hold option when choosing from the right click (or press cmd-opt-i) to get the “inspector” instead which will give you information about the whole group of files.

And related if you do open a mess of individual info windows, holding option while closing a window will close all windows in an application (note that since the info windows are in the finder, this will close your finder window too)


Thanks for the tips. I was aware of holding option to show inspector but not about this behaviour while closing apps holding it. Nice to know. As always, the best features of Macos are the hidden ones.

Still, to me, inspector should be the default.


You mean you didn't want 400 info windows that have to be closed individually?


> there is only a back button and not a go up directory button

Command-click the folder name in the title bar.

Or, View > Show Path Bar.


or Command + Up Arrow


[flagged]


Calm down man. That comment was a solution to a problem, not a defense in any sense. Yikes.


> secret hotkey

It's the third item in the Finder Go menu. Not exactly secret.


Really one of the worst pieces of software I've ever been forced to use.


Windows Explorer isn't great either. Still can't support names/paths that the windows filesystem can


Sorry but windows explorer is miles ahead of finder.

Granted that's not that hard with how bad finder really is.


Naw, Windows Explorer is basically useless for productivity. No QuickLook, no spring-loaded folders, can't show directory sizes in list view, for some reason it sorts directories separately from files(?!?) so you can't just type to jump to files, search is still atrocious etc etc. It's just so barren.

No the Finder UI is far superior. The part where it falls down is just in sheer bugginess and performance. And Apple of the past couple years has shown it does not care about fixing bugginess or performance on any of their platforms.


Yeah no. Finder is garbage on every conceivable level.


Seriously I don't get how anyone can literally defend that garbage.

Bunch of Stockholm syndrome going around.


I prefer enter to not open folders and files. Command+O opens.

Should be configurable though.


Make that two of us. Enter is too easy to fumble-press while having tens or hundreds of files selected, so it’s better to have that hooked to something inconsequential and easily reversible. By comparison Command-O is much harder to press unintentionally.

Also if I recall correctly, enter to rename has been Mac convention since the beginning, making it not wrong but just different.


Ok, step back a bit... I have a file selected, I have a key called 'enter' - if I press 'enter' what would you expect to happen? I'd expect to 'enter' the file - by opening it or 'entering' the file. I wouldn't expect it to 'enter a new name', because that's an editing function.

Now, my mac has enter marked as 'return'. Let's follow the same logic, assume I have a file selected, what should 'return' on a file do? Return it to where?


I see the logic, but in my opinion fumbles with this shortcut are catastrophic enough (sitting there waiting for N files to open in however many apps so they can all be closed) that the “logical” option shouldn’t necessarily be favored. That said, the alternative doesn’t necessarily have to be Command-O (though I like the mnemonics of that), some other modifier paired with return/enter could work too, but I really don’t think it should be a single key shortcut.


The key is Return. It's always been called Return on Macs (AFAIK). "Return to rename" is just a convention, and it doesn't make sense, but calling the key Enter and not making a distinction between Return and Enter is a Windowsism, just like expecting Ctrl + C to work, the semaphore to be on the right side of the window and — for the longest time — expecting the green dot to "maximize" the app (since changed from Zoom to Fullscreen).


The button is labeled “Return” on Macs. You certainly don’t expect that button to navigate back..


Cmd+Down is more generic. It’s the “enter” (as in “go into”) to Cmd+Up’s “leave” / “go out of.”


Enter = one key

Cmd+whatever = annoying chord.


I have legitimately never had a complaint about Finder and I don’t really get the hate in this thread. I guess to each his own.


You never had to check the size of lets say 10 folders at once?

Try doing that in Finder and let us know if you like the approach or not.


Believe it or not, I’ve never had to check the size of ten separate folders at once. Like, ever.

I have to amend my previous comment; reading the thread I do understand the hate now, nearly all of the comments here where people are angry at Finder are just things I’ve never had to do. And I suppose if I had to do them I would just use a shell script.

A big one is “no button to go up in the folder hierarchy”, I always open folders in a list view at a high level directory like ~/Documents so I just… didn’t notice the lack of this button. Huh.

Does this mean Finder is “good”? Well clearly not since so many people are unhappy. But it’s working fine for me. Without any other info I would assume it’s working fine for a majority of macOS users.


⌘⌥I?


> enter doesn't open the folder

That’s a little like complaining that Alt-F4 is unintuitive, isn’t it? It’s historical continuity. On the other hand, they changed Command-N…

> there is only a back button and not a go up directory button

Can’t argue with that one, though.


apple is weird, because on one hand they maintain vestiges in macos from back in the 80s and 90s when it comes to weird ux and file/window management things even though they are severely dated by todays standards. this is possibly suggesting that they don't want to rug pull people who have have grown accustomed to a certain workflow, but then at the same time they will make drastic changes like completely abandoning x11, for all intents and purposes opengl, completely change cpu architectures multiple times and remove hardware peripheral ports that people depend on without batting an eye.


Also sometimes they do make really painful and arbitrary UI/UX changes - don’t get me started on the iOS podcast app. Personally I’m all for preserving keyboard shortcuts because that’s something I really internalize but it would be hard to argue that they are consistent taking any kind of broader view.


cmd-up goes up a directory tree

cmd-down goes down a directory tree if you have a directory selected or opens a file if one is selected

IMO more intuitive than "enter opens file, backspace goes back", but YMMV


Are you using cmd-o to open link in Safari too?


I don't tend to use the keyboard when navigating web pages.


Not even when you are typing address or searching?


Icon-view mode is baffling. After maybe two decades, I still don't know what "clean-up by ..." means or why it just doesn't arrange things nicely by default.


"Clean Up By" arranges files by the selected attribute, compared to "Sort By" which keeps files arranged by the selected attribute. If I were Apple I would have either gone with `Arrange/Sort By` and `Keep Arranged/Sorted By` or a single menu `Sort By` with a toggle-able option to keep it sorted by the selected item.

I suspect the latter at least might not be done because then the menu items for the attributes you sort by would remain selected or reset automatically depending on the state of the `Keep Sorted` toggle, which would be weirdly inconsistent. But then again the `Clean up By` menu enables and disabled depending on the state of the `Sort By` menu, which is arguably even more inconsistent and confusing.


>there is only a back button and not a go up directory button

You can press Command-up; and also add such a button in the toolbar from View > Customize Toolbar.


it's fucking outrageous.

one of my favorites: go save a file in some deeply nested directory. use Column view in the save dialog to get you there.

now try to save another file. you're in Column view only there's one one column: the last saved folder.

ZERO WAY to get back out!

WHY WOULD YOU TRUNCATE ALL OF THE PARENTS FOLDERS FOR NO REASON!


Can't you go up a folder using the dropdown at the top?


Yes which is completely insane.

Here we made these columns. But arbitrarily we decided can't use them, so here's a flat, non-structured, hodgepodge miniature list of stuff in a drop-down.


Not sure what app you are doing this in.

I just tried a few e.g. Safari, Word and can't recreate the behaviour.

Every time column view shows the full hierarchy.


I had the same experience as the author, and spent a lot of time tinkering with various macOS configuration options trying to make it work reliably and quickly with the network shares from Synology NAS. Something that is effortlessly works on Windows and Linux machines out of box.

Eventually, I just gave up. It simply doesn’t seem to be possible. I find it extremely embarrassing for Apple that the fastest way to download and upload the files from the NAS is via its web interface, considering how much more complexity it involves compared to SMB/Samba that were specifically designed for the purpose.


ssh/sftp?


Does macOS support mounting SFTP shares?


Transmit (by Panic) used to allow this functionality a while ago. The closest thing that would replicate some of the niceties of a Samba or NFS mount are taken care of by sshfs, but that utility is only maintained sparingly nowadays (and has a bunch of little quirks for use cases besides "copying files to and from the share").

I use Transmit sometimes when I'm just trying to copy folders and files and don't want to whip out scp, but otherwise, I like Samba and NFS, just... they're terrible in Finder.


Thank you. I’ll give it a try


There are some third party apps that support mounting SFTP or other remote drives/paths so that they’re accessible in Finder and in other apps. Some of these are Transmit (by Panic Software), Forklift by Binary Nights, and Mountain Duck.


I find folder navigation in Finder so bad, that whenever I need to use it for something (rare), I prefer to "cd" through the terminal then do an "open ."


The main bad thing is the lack of an obvious ‘parent’ button for going up the file hierarchy. It only seems to support the idea of going back in time, which is almost never what I want.


I agree with you, but just in case you don't know, Cmd + Up goes up the hierarchy, Cmd + Down descends into the highlighted directory. I rarely use the mouse in Finder. List view, arrow keys and these two shortcuts are just faster.


Thank you. I think I used to use that a lot but didn’t use macOS for a period of a few years and lost the muscle memory.

I feel like if you’re going to use the keyboard, though,

cd ..

is just as fast.


Yeah keyboard is the way to go. My absolute favourite completely hidden shortcut in Finder is, because all hotkeys are modifier keys, you can quickly type a few unique characters of the dir/file name and it’ll jump right to it


Yes! That’s quite nice. I quite like the fact that you can rename files by hitting enter and just typing. And space toggles a very quick preview that depends on file type.

Finder’s not all bad!


The enter shortcut really threw me at first. Because everyone else uses enter to mean open the file. It just seems like an odd choice, since people open files far more often than they rename them.


quicklook is great. (I think something like it is built into nautilus now) Hitting enter to rename a file threw me so hard initially that I muscle memorised the f2 shortcut for other systems.


You can enable the "Show Path Bar" option (under the "View" menu), which helps, but still not quite what you want. I also find it weird that the path bar is at the bottom of the window.


After many years of struggling I learned recently “cmd + up arrow” will bring you to the parent folder.

Of course that combo is close to your mousing hand. Not ideal but better than filing around with that drop down and cursing.


Right-click the folder name in Finder’s title bar, shows and allows jumping to parent folders.


Agreed but column view is pretty nice though.

And hitting space bar for Quick Look is pretty awesome. Especially if you have the right extensions installed.


MacOS in generally is very buggy around SMB in my experience. Windows and Linux don't have these issues. Only android file apps in my experience are as buggy around SMB shares.

My macbook often disconnects randomly from my SMB fileserver. I ran into a bug just yesterday where the laptop client would reject re-authentification to the server after I manually disconnected from the SMB server. The only fix was to restart the macbook.


FYI, macOS Finder SMB perf is just fine as long as you connect to the SMB share by its IP address (i.e. by typing “smb://10.0.1.1” in the Cmd+K dialog.)

It’s only when you connect to an SMB share by name (incl. by browsing to the share in the Network view) that things get hinky.


It considers '/etc/hosts' when resolving names, right? I wonder if putting the name/IP in there makes it closer to equal - primitive cache


Wtf! I've never known that!

Of course I have anyone connecting to SMB://fileserver to make it convenient and stable across router reboots.

I didn't expect naming it to be an issue.


I think the Finder — or discoveryd underneath — is doing some kind of non-cached(!) WINS name lookup for each fopen(2) syscall against SMB shares mounted through their WINS name.

If your SMB server is running Linux, IIRC (this was ~8 years ago, so this might no longer be true) that it also seemed to work, to run avahi on the Linux host, configured to announce the system the way you would if you were setting up AFP on the host; and to have avahi then announce SMB as a service (mDNS SRV record) for the system.

I'd recommend trying to find an old guide for setting up a Linux AFP server. You don't actually have to set up (or even install) AFP, though; just do all the avahi parts!

Why does this work? I think it's because, unlike for the WINS names underlying SMB, macOS seems to have an optimized and cached name-lookup path within discoveryd for the mDNS SRV records that would underlie AFP shares. And this code-path seems to be perfectly happy with discovering an SMB share via mDNS. (Probably because of some legacy transition Apple went through internally, where AFP shares were deprecated + replaced with SMB shares, while still being published "as if they were" AFP shares, via mDNS.)


It's not just SMB. it's nfs and iscsi too. Awful performance or downright completely buggy and broken. Iscsi requires third party software and you can enjoy the year 2006 in terms of performance. It's truly pathetic.


you are caught in a crossfire, basically, between two huge companies and their networking.


I don't find reads to be very fast either. I have a lot of photos on my network drive, and opening or previewing them feels like I'm on dial-up or worse. On Windows, scrolling the folder in thumbnail mode renders them pretty smoothly on-demand, while macOS takes ages. Even just trying to open a single JPG from the network often takes 5-10 seconds. I can't even imagine why. I noticed that if I split up the folder into smaller batches and browse those subfolders instead, it's better.

A few months ago I also painstakingly went through and added tags and comments to many of these files. Later, when the network drive was remounted, the comments were all wiped out while the tags remained (presumably, because of the different attribute storage mechanisms the different fields use, combined with the changing mount ID). Maybe that's recoverable somehow, but I simply don't have the patience. To me, it's as good as lost. Thanks, macOS!


I mostly use Carbon Copy Cloner, PathFinder, ditto and rsync because if I try to copy anything more than a few files it's like I'm running MacOS 9 and I have to babysit the copy like it's a five year old riding a bike with training wheels.

It's pretty clear whomever is leading MacOS dev efforts has been given the directive to not commit any new resources to the MacOS Finder.

For organizing files, I use File Browser Pro (iOS/Apple Silicon), Leap, DevonTHINK and anything else except the finder and tags which have never really worked very well.

There are bugs in the Finder and Disk Utility that have persisted for multiple OS releases and I simply don't trust GUI file management tools in modern MacOS.

In my view, Apple has decided to kill the Mac as a tool and wants everyone to use their Apple devices as consoles except devs who have to put up with being treated as second class citizens while Apple simultaneously uses the same lot of folks to do QA during "public betas".

As an Apple follower for decades, I'm running away from the platform and have recently replaced iCloud (for all intents and purposes) with Syncthing. I use old Intel Macs as daily drivers because you can't really multitask effectively with Apple Silicon -and- work with files because, well, memory contention is still a problem with iGPUs just like it always has been. The speed-up of the much vaunted Apple Silicon has EVERYTHING to do with the physical proximity of the processor cores to the DRAM except when you have a lot of process running then the kernel panics because memory contention issues with storage since MOST storage has to be on the USB bus and you can get into situations where the Mac can't keep the files system consistent because APFS, snapshots and Time Machine are a fuxxing disaster... sorry folks. /venting.

I think Jeff should try ssfs with disk images on either end to get closer to 125 MB/s.


> It's pretty clear whomever is leading MacOS dev efforts has been given the directive to not commit any new resources to the MacOS Finder.

Funny to say, because I just noticed the other day that as of the latest macOS version, Finder directory copies now have some kind of progress metadata (as an xattr of the top level copied folder?) that allows you to cancel [or presumably fail due to network loss] and then later resume copies.


This is both a blessing (when it actually works on a huge transfer) and a curse (when things are being weird, usually network issues or a flaky remote connection, and you can't remove the weird greyed-out folder).


> and you can't remove the weird greyed-out folder

I'm not sure I've run into this state, but I would guess it would work to toggle your wi-fi off to trip the folder over into the "transfer failed" state (where it's no longer greyed out, and instead displays the little "Retry" emblem on the filename), and then delete it.


What percentage of Macbook profit margins accrue from overpriced flash storage? While other components of a Macbook benefit from Apple's well-earned brand premium, Apple internal storage prices bear little relationship to flash memory cost or retail prices for NVME SSDs.

Would macOS/iOS network file transfer (e.g. automated sync/backup/restore) be more reliable or better supported, if Apple had a revenue model for network (LAN/VPN, not public cloud) storage? Could Mac Mini with 10GbE networking be a reliable file server with an external Thunderbolt disk array?


> if Apple had a revenue model for network storage

Well, they did, once upon a time. I still don't understand why they killed the AirPort and Time Capsule range right as they were trying to expand HomeKit.


My pet theory: Because they wouldn't have any excuse for not allowing network backups of iOS devices to them, driving people into overpriced iCloud storage plans.


> What percentage of Macbook profit margins accrue from overpriced flash storage?

They want to sell iCloud subscriptions, because it's the recurring revenue for them.

I'm still somewhat amazed photo/video/audio creatives, who deal with large files all the time, have to deal with apple's bullshit around storage.

Most of creatives I've worked with end up with file storage solutions like messy solutions like "stack of external drives".


I'm a photographer dealing with many terabytes of files (numbers go up fast when you're shooting 100 megapixel RAWs).

As far as I'm concerned, having a stack of redundant external drives is a feature, not a bug.

I can easily plug them to a collaborator's computer when network is slow (which is almost always).

If one fails, no big deal, I can just swap it out with another one bought at a local store.

We're really spoiled, SSDs are tiny and super fast and relatively cheap these days. I remember lugging around 3.5" drives...

I always get a laptop with the minimal amount of storage, the money you'd spend upgrading is better spent on drives. That way if it fails, I can buy a new machine, plug in my existing drives, and I'm ready to resume my workflow in 30 minutes.

No single point of failure.

Same with SD cards, much better to have a bunch of 64 GB than one single expensive 512GB.

(of course, I have a nice beefy storage array at my home studio)

Now if software would catch up...


Look, if you're in the field and having a bunch of SD cards and drives, that's cool.

As long as you back your stuff up correctly at some point. The pile of drives can be part of your 3-2-1 if you want.

Retrieval is also terrible with "my stack of drives" as well. Having to physically search through drives to get to a file is why we left paper to the 20th century.


But how are you backing up your external drives?

I think Time Machine supports it, but you'd need one single drive large enough to store the content of all external drives you use.


Yeah on premises drives are where it’s at for anything data intensive. I don’t regularly handle the volumes of data you do, but have on occasion and based on past experience I wouldn’t use cloud storage for anything remotely heavy duty, regardless of the desktop platforms and cloud services involved. Too much room for things to go awry when I can’t physically plug the storage in.

I’ll use cloud storage for off-premises backup in addition to local backups, but that’s about it.


How was his basic first step not immediately swapping out the Mac? Sparing "many hours of debugging" reads like he'd just prefer a solution over the practice/insight. But maybe I'm misreading him.


I've got a beefy synology nas and a variety of macs and have always had issues with smb shares, despite applying the configuration tweaks even apple recommends on their support site. i get full gigabit-speed as expected when using nfs, though, so i stick with that.


Huh, interesting, I also have a decent synology (ds1621xs+), and feel like I haven't experienced too many issues with it. Time Machine over smb is wonky, but time machine overall is just wonky. And another one, working with / copying many small files is always pretty bad, but I mostly use it for larger files.

I just tried copying a large video file onto the NAS via smb and get around 700MB/s, which is around what I would expect for the setup (5 * 16TB ironwolf pro in raid5, connected via thunderbolt to an sfp+ adapter). Few other things you could try apart from those articles:

* `defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE` to not write the DS files to network locations

* Connect via IP address in cmd+K connect window.

* _Turn off_ wifi completely when you connect via ethernet. Otherwise it's very likely the connection will still end up going through the wifi interface.

* Enable jumbo frames on the interface (mtu 9000).

* Check `smbutil statshares -a`. You want SMB 3. If it's a LAN and you don't care about encryption, then `SMB_CURR_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHM` should be `off`.


Can you share the Apple-recommended tweaks? I'm trying to google it and not finding anything.


There are a few, but these links should get you started and hint at future keywords for search. The first link is the one I was thinking of, but there are more. YMMV with link 3 (samba wiki).

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102010

2. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102050

3. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Bet...


Isn't this because Windows uses a kernel driver and macOS a user space one? Some overhead is to be expected.

I know macOS is a lot more keen on putting things traditionally in kernel into the user space to decrease the attack surface.


Are there good alternatives to Finder like Total Commander for Windows (https://www.ghisler.com/). I still miss it.


Forklift (https://binarynights.com/) and Path Finder (https://www.cocoatech.io/) are the two big ones I think.


For remote connections Transmit[0] is solid and among the oldest Mac apps still in development.

[0]: https://panic.com/transmit/


Transmit has been and so far unless proven otherwise always will be one of the top 5 little apps for the Mac platform. Panic has always made some of the most intuitive/useful utilities, and there are few companies with the consistent hits that they've had.


I’m a big fan of Panic too. Been using Transmit for a long time.


Impossible to open the context menu with keyboard (Shift+F10 on Windows)


I’ve had minimal issues with SMB against my Gentoo ZFS server, but I may not be using it the way others do.

I do have the Time Machine enhancements in Samba enabled.


Can we also talk about the green button is "full screen" and not a maximized window?

I had an app that adds windows tiling that also added this feature and it made osx a breeze to use. Better touch type or something like that.

I went back to windows because I couldn't give up my magsafe and HDMI port. Go figure immediately after I bought a Razer blade apple understood their error and brought back the magsafe and HDMI ports.


The green button is still “maximize” if you hold Cmd while clicking it; and you can switch which one is the default behavior in Settings.


The green button is still “maximize” if you hold Cmd while clicking it; and you can switch which one is the default behavior in Settings.

Half of the macOS complaints on HN are always PEBKAC from people who won't RTFM.


These things constantly change and who has time for all of that?

Windows to me is intuitive by default, I can't find macOS intuitive after 10 years even when being forced to work with it professionally.

I still can't deal with copy paste ctrl/cmd btn being in an awkward position and if I change it in the settings other problems ensue. My muscle memory is all kinds of done.


>These things constantly change and who has time for all of that?

While Apple does change some things with some regularity, the change from "Zoom Window" to "Full Screen" for the green button (and it's alternate behavior when holding option) has been in place since 10.7, 13 years ago. The ability to double click a window titlebar to get the same effect has been in place since the classic mac OS days. I imagine most people have time within a 13 year period to type "Maximize" into the Help search and read the "Move and arrange app windows" topic, and specifically the "Maximize or minimize app windows" section therein.


> the change from "Zoom Window" to "Full Screen" for the green button (and it's alternate behavior when holding option) has been in place since 10.7

Not exactly, full screen was introduced in 10.7 (Lion) but it used a separate button on the right side of the window. 10.10 (Yosemite) moved it to the green button.


> Windows to me is intuitive by default

Because you are used to it. It would've been the other way around if you grew up with macOS. I have no problem with both of these systems after spending the time to get used to how macOS behaves. Hated it at first too after being "forced" to use it at work because I wanted to use it like Windows.


But I still feel bad about using it even though I have been using it as primary for 10 years now.

All the little details annoy me, like the animations, settings, mouse acceleration, etc, etc.

I know some animations can be turned off, some things can be tweaked, but this is also annoying.

I haven't ever seen as cheesy animations as the genie or the annoying jumping icon.

Spotlight search rarely giving me the results I want, then at last moment when I'm going to pick something, changing the results, etc.

And in general the toolbar design I don't like at all, I still can't reliably feel it out when the toolbar should pop up from the bottom when not, and then all the windows are kind of positioned in a messed up way due to that, either having a weird gap below when the toolbar is not visible.

Windows has it flat out constantly visible.


And Windows has added the stupid search bar, changed the start menu, made stuff in the task bar slot on the right side automatically hide etc.

Completely unintuitive.

Of course when you're "forced" to work with something, you don't have the motivation to learn to use it properly.

Just like me with Windows. I just can't understand the logic of having a global shortcut to open Linkedin for example :)


And where is the manual for OSX?

I swear, half the people on HN are OSX sychophants who can't fathom a minor criticism on the UX for OSX. It doesn't, "just work" all the time and guess what? Even IOS has its own UX quirks (swipe back ring a bell)?

We get it, you're a herd follower and like looking cool by buying over priced fashion tech pieces.


And where is the manual for OSX?

Google is your friend:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac

Clearly you're not up to date on what's happening with Apple, or Macs since "OSX" hasn't been a thing since 2016.


A pedantic engineer has appeared!

This may come as a surprise to you, but I don't care. I don't have time to read manuals and spend time on the welcome documentation.

If it isn't obvious OOTB how to use somettbing like an OS that is built on the presupposition of ease of us, then your UX is bad and not intuitive. We're not talking specializes software here like a DAW or a IDE. It's a desktop OS ffs.


Translation: I don’t know how to use something new and it doesn’t do exactly what I imagine it should do and instead of learning I get mad


The thread:

> complaints .. are ... from people who won't RTFM

> (you) And where is the manual for OSX?

> [link]

> (you) I don't care. I don't have time to read manuals

Are you being serious?


Yes. OSX is designed precisely so one doesn't have to RTFM. If my you can't see that, go back to your Mac. We get it you're a follower.


There is no "OSX". You don't know anything about me. Stop being obtuse.


There’s a help menu right at the top of the screen. In every app it will search the menus and provided application help. In the finder, it also has a “macOS help” item which brings up the offline user manual, including the table of contents where you will find the entry “Apps -> Work with app windows -> Maximize or minimize app windows”


My wife's iOS crashes multiple times a week. She does open too much stuff but that's no excuse for an OS crash.

We went to genius bar and they basically told her she was using it wrong.

I guess OS stability is not guaranteed these days.


I agree that that's no excuse and I'm genuinely sorry about your wife's experience, but it just doesn't happen to many people. I'm currently on my first iPhone, a 13 Mini, and I don't remember it ever "crashing". I don't even know what that looks like, like if there's an error message or if it just hangs or goes black, I don't know how to force-reboot it, because I don't need to. My fiancée and my dad are both on their first iPhones and (because I'm the one who talked them into it) I ask them regularly if they're happy — they both are, with zero issues.

To be fair, there was a period when Safari on my iPad would hang occasionally, and that got resolved by an update.


Amen, like I said Apple psychophants are everywhere.


Works for some programs but not for other. The best permanant fix was bettertouchtool.


Window management in macOS has gotten worse over time.

There are at least 3 ways to do everything now (e.g. Classic windowing, fullscreen splits, Spaces, Stage Manager), and they're all a bit crap.

Apple needs to implement a proper window management API that lets you replace Dock.app (which controls a lot of window management suff IIRC) so that we can do it ourselves and not rely on accessibility API hacks or disabling SIP.


Windows explorer is pretty bad at file copies too, especially network file copies.


Afaik Apple wrote their own implementation of SAMBA (smbx) instead of using the opensource samba client and frankly to be kind it is not performant - dunno why they went this route.


In a word? GPLv3.




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