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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

(weiyen.net)
700 points yen223 | 3 comments | 06 Nov 24 05:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.626s | source
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zitterbewegung ◴[06 Nov 24 13:19 UTC] No.42061843[source]▶
The terminal version of Disk Utility is actually much better than the GUI (it doesn't hang and the app is glitchy.

Docs are at https://ss64.com/mac/diskutil.html

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1. seec ◴[06 Nov 24 20:42 UTC] No.42069049[source]▶
Disk Utility used to be excellent, a model of how an app should be. But then they rewrote it in Swift and now it's just bad.

Apple promotes Swift heavily but the results are not really encouraging. I don't think the "so-so" results are entirely because of Swift (probably due to newer, less battle tested software and also newer/younger devs) but still the fact is, all the not-so-great new software from Apple came with Swift rewrites, hard to not make a connection...

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2. zitterbewegung ◴[06 Nov 24 23:26 UTC] No.42071169[source]▶
I have known the UI bring bad in general and I think it has more due to APFS… I used to be able to do backups but APFS is so different to everything else that at this point I wish Apple switched to ZFS but honestly that wasn’t gonna happen after the buyout of Sun to oracle .

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/18ez5b0/why_disk_utili...

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3. seec ◴[07 Nov 24 02:18 UTC] No.42072606[source]▶
AFPS is more complex yes, and it's sad they let down Time Machine (somewhat) with it, considering the capabilities. But that's pretty much on point with current Apple, they would rather have you pay for iCloud "backup" than make an individual/personal solution that doesn't require subscription to their services.

It's a bit sad because the whole point of Apple was, "we are not IBM" after the PC got its start. They are very much IBM now.

As for ZFS, it has its use for sure (servers) but it's very heavy on ressource and very complex. I don't think it's just because of the buyout of Sun, overall, it's just overkill for a personal computer; and since Apple completely left the server market, even for SMBs, there is no real reason to push for it.

In the end it's not really about any filesystem, the problem is mostly that Apple is not a user focused company as much as it used to be. They could make better technical UI/Apps/Solutions but they don't care that much, they make too much money selling gadgets (those are good but really not the same thing as "proper" computers).