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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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 ."
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>I think Jeff should try ssfs with disk images on either end to get closer to 125 MB/s.
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.<p>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?
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.
Isn't this because Windows uses a kernel driver and macOS a user space one? Some overhead is to be expected.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.ghisler.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghisler.com/</a>). I still miss it.
I’ve had minimal issues with SMB against my Gentoo ZFS server, but I may not be using it the way others do.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.