You just gotta think different

I have a mac I use for some specific tasks. I’ll agree the Apple is, ehh, Apple.

But mounting network fileshares is dead simple. My SMB share pops right up, authentication works fine, the user interface for it is fine. If I wanted to use it remotely, I’d just export it over my tailnet.

’sshfs’ is good for short stints of brief use, but ultimately it breaks on a protocol level as soon as your socket dies, on any OS.

<rant>

Love how this meme once again shows a Linux terminal command (that only works on specific distros) instead of what most users would want (which would work on almost any user-friendly distro), the button in the File Manager to add the network share to your left sidebar.

Somehow people still believe CLI commands are superior, meanwhile people who just want to get Linux-unrelated shit done (that isn't IT-related either) don't understand what exactly happens here and won't be able to permanently add the share to their file browser this way. Y'know, the way most people would use it in their daily workflow.

Where Apple fails in proper software integration, Linux fails in feature communication. Instead of properly integrating features (Apple) or providing/focusing on doing things intuitively and accessibly (Linux), both want the user to start thinking their way. And I fucking hate it, it prevents Linux from becoming more popular.

</rant>

Running both Linux and macOS on a daily basis… They’re both completely competent, and have basically the same amount of rough edges once you dig in and get your hands dirty. If you find one of them impossibly difficult, it’s a skill issue.

I use nfs shares for this use case.

My SO has a MacBook, and I thought no sweat, I'm sure I can just autofs or something onto the NAS so that the photo storage is always there. I was wrong. Why dies it have to be such a pain? So clunky, so unreliable.

I have this problem with Android. Google has turned the filesystem into unusable garbage, so you're lucky, if you can launch a gallery app with a file path and it allows you to actually go through the images in that folder.

And of course, that's with a local file path, so the situation is completely hopeless when your images are on a network share. Unless the gallery app itself implements the network protocol, you're out of luck.
Wanna guess how often that happens? Yeah, it simply doesn't. Even if it's theoretically just a library, when you build it into the gallery app, that dev has to continually maintain and test it.

Wouldn't you just use AFS, CEPH, NFS, or 9p?

I really don't want to be that guy, but isn't SSHFS (FUSE) actually a terrible option when compared to an actual file-system? MacOS isn't really missing out on much there.

The most painful part of MacOS (which makes it downright unbearable for me) is that system configuration files are XML. It's an absolute nightmare.

I just wish both these platforms would get some modern remote desktop support built in. Remoting into Mac/linux vs Windows desktops feels like dealing with tech from completely different time periods.

Thank god most of my Linux remote work is ssh on the cli.

<chuckles> We use dnf here.

<tips hat and runs>

Also Windows: "Ask your network administrator for access."
Me: "Well I'm my own network administrator so what questions do you want me to ask myself"?
Windows: "Enter network username and password."
Me: There is no network username or password. Sod it, I'll bung them on an external disk.

The post refers SSHFS which is based upon FUSE, a very neat technology in the Linux kernel which allows a non-kernel develloper - says a python developer-to turn anything into a hierarchy of files and folders, that you can access and modify with your regular local applications. When I says anything, I'm dead serious, FUSE may turn the whole internet into a fake browsable tree of local files on your system. On windows, you have to write a fake disk driver to mimic a fraction of the feature. I don't know ios but I guess Apple wouldn't never allow such a wizardry by design.

What are you talking about? SMB on MacOS is crazy reliable!

Can you not just brew install sshfs on a mac? (Assuming you’ve already installed Homebrew).

Bruh just use smb

macFUSE

I don’t know what you expected, that is a huge hack.

Windows: ☠️

I have a pc I use as a dedicated file server, and a MacBook which connects seamlessly to that file server via my home WiFi, and I stream movies easily. My AppleTV and iPad stream from it too, no problem. I don’t look like that guy on the right. Am I doing something wrong?

Why nobody mentions samba?? That is the only thing I knew

TIL about sshfs and life got a little bit nicer

Used sshfs at work the other day for SFTP. Wanted to do a recursive search and it didn't seem possible with filezilla on my Windows laptop. Started my Linux VM and sshfs followed by find/grep to get the info I needed.

I use both of these systems daily. They have some issues but are just fine for me. Honestly, they are just opposite extremes and I respect that. They each chose a side.

Whereas windows makes me scream. It’s absolute horseshit that pretends to claim some middle ground that makes no one happy.

I was stumped. I found some duck to to enable.this, but holy fuck was it painful to install

>2025
>Not using Plan 9 for distributed computing

ISHYGDDT

Isn't is fuse? Why then it doesn't work on darwin?

Doesn't rclone allow for this? (Not sure how well it would with tough)

Lmfao

Haha I can personally attest to it being slightly more complex than that on Linux, but true for OSX.

I’ve been considering rsync

I need to run git operations from a laptop (on a vpn) but I can’t build from the laptop, I can only build from a host that is only accessible on the vpn.

So I can only git pull / git push from the laptop, but I can only build / run / test from a remote host.

Linux on both sides. What’s the best solution here?