ARGHH !!! Mac OSX el crappytain

[chaos4u]

Apologies, this is a rant so skip if you dont want to waste your time.

What is it with mac developers ? its like every piece of the software is written to perform in a limited scope.

case in point been dealing with a failed mac for the last few weeks, made what was thought to be a time machine backup which took over 2 days to complete .or what was determined to be completed, but hey with mac you dont get status bar or updates on things your just kinda in limbo on whether something took place or not . so we have a supposed time machine back up.

so now we are going to use the wonderful mac migration utility to move our old mac onto the new mac and this worked (that was actually quite nice)

so now we are almost back in biz except for when we try to move files back and forth between the synology nas over gigabit eth. and this process takes forever the lil calculating thing just sits there and does nothing as you wait and wait annnnnnd waaait some more. then one or two things occur. either it starts to copy slowly...or the calculating thing disappears and no files copy. (and trying to verify directories on a mac ugh..)

so waste time figuring out whats going on there, and its the spot light thing doing jobs knows what to the nas, that prevents it from transferring files properly. so add the nas to the private section of spotlight . ok file transfers seem like there almost normal.

except for the large folders of data that arent... these some time hang the mac for no reason .. its not spot light this time, but odd files that must have been corrupted by the old mac as they have no owner and you cant change the owner or permission on the files easily . this mac loves to puzzle over these files for hours...

so now we know the mac cant deal with corrupted files cant deal with spot light goofing about the nas .

so lets just move the freaking photo database over to the mac hardrive in hopes that maybe its a bit quicker.

yay it transfers fairly quick which is a nice change.

unfortunately now the freaking photo database will not allow you to delete photos also when moving photos to a new albums the photo is copied not moved so it stays in both albums . so fine lets do a repair .


im such a stupid idiot... here i am thinking the mac is actually going to repair the database......

control command option left click good lord why is this not a menu item ?? annnnd we start the database repair..

bam finishes in a few seconds wow that was pretty quick got to hand it to these mac engineers they really know how to


.......... blink ................. ................. blink ..................


closes photos.. reopens photo.............

WHAT THE HELLL it deleted every damn photo from the photo app and started it with a clean database ??

thats a repair !!?? at this point i beat my head against the desk looking forward to the wonderful time im going to have extracting out the photos from the photo container and manually re-adding them back in .


Macs i dont know what they are good for.

working with files and transferring data on this thing has been a nightmare

the only thing that was nice was the mac migration .

dont even get me started on what time machine did and did not back up.

but lessons learned from this.


1. do not use time machine as a back up application its persnickety as to what it will back up and will waste excessive hours of your time.


2. if you are using a nas ensure that spotlight is not indexing it.


3. dont buy a mac for anything because once something goes wrong with it your in the bad lands so to speak because the lack of tools available to fix issues is very lacking . and the mac forums are always filled with the same answer to problems . i.e:



hi i have a mac issue i want to delete a photo from photo but i cant.

- hi welcome to mac !! why do you want to delete a photo ?


um because i dont want it no more . and its taking up disk space.


- well you know that mac manages your files for you and there is no need to delete files especially from photo since it manages all your photos for you.


um thats great but i have no need for this photo


- well thats fine you can move it to another album and hide it.


really? look i just want to delete the photo i dont need a bunch of files on my disk.


- oh but you do all the files on your mac have a purpose and to go about willy knilly deleting them is bad, just best let the mac deal witth them


Look guy thanks for the info but i really just need to delete the file ok ?


- will its your mac so if you want to take the chance then you need to hold down command option click the picture and choose delete.


great thanks .


- your welcome enjoy your mac.


::couple hours latter::


hey i know you said that command option and choose delete deletes the pic but looking at my disk space im noticing that im not getting in any more free space is there something im missing ??


- the picture is deleted . it has been moved to a deleted items album thats hidden from view.


uh what ? i told photo to delete it .


- and photo did .


um let me check that .... um looking at the deleted item folder and its full of the photos i just checked them and they are full size images it looks like all photo did was move them to this folder.


- that is correct.


why are they not deleted !!


- they are deleted . there in the deleted items folder so they are deleted .


omg ...... ok how do i remove these off my mac .


- you did . you deleted the file and now it is the deleted item folder so the file is now deleted.


yeah ok but how do i reclaim the disk space that deleted items it taking up.


- you dont photo will remove those items in about 30 days .


but i need the space now .

-dont worry about space your mac will manage your files for you just leave things alone and you will rest better knowing that your mac will take are of you. good night and hope you dream of jobs....

 

[BulletDust]

Your


Post


Is


Very


Spaced


Out!

Sorry, just a bit of light hearted humor!

 

[Snufykat]

It

is

not

hard

to

see

why

you

might

need

more

space

 

[PliotronX]

I had a fun stint figuring out what was wrong with the much lauded Fusion Drive. Damn thing was placing the most used programs into the slow 3TB drive and almost nothing into the SSD portion. In trying to figure it out, I appealed to actual Mac forums and the snobs, living up to the stereotype, only suggested taking it to the Apple Store which found nothing wrong. Later a more experienced Mac user helped the Fusion Drive owner reinstall the OS onto a discrete SSD volume and was as fast as when it was new. Solidified my position that I will never wittingly purchase a Mac.

 

[gimp]

set



buckets



to



11

I cannot read the OP.

Space your post appropriately and maybe people will actually read it. Even if it is a rant.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

The fusion drive is basically a glorified LVM setup. Picture a JBOD that auto load balances to the faster volume.

The iMacs with the fusion drives basically have a 1-3TB HDD and a 128GB PCI-E SSD. The most commonly used information gets cached to the 128GB SSD.
Sadly.... the newer generation iMacs are coming with 32GB PCI-E SSDs. Why? Hell if I know.

I've run into multiple cases of drive failure. MAKE SURE TO RUN BACKUPS. If either the HDD or the SSD fails, you're up a creek.


OP: I'm also running into problems understanding your post. A good amount of it comes down to "Use the right tool for the job" and Apple isn't really scaling well to the power users (or the enterprise) at the moment.

 

[SuperSubZero]

the username + post do seem to match up.

 

[BulletDust]

It

is

not

hard

to

see

why

you

might

need

more

space

Oh god, guts hurt from laughing so much! Sorry OP.

 

[chaos4u]

sorry for that extra spacing, when word added the extra double spacing i didnt bother with reediting it .. but its fixed better now.. (and no i know its not perfect im not writing a Pulitzer piece here.)

nice to know about the lvm setup of the storage .. that is pretty incredible that apple would do such a thing .. knowing the risks and all.

as for right tool for the job .... well that was supposed to be time machine. because it is what macs work with and it used to be portrayed as the tool to use to back up your mac .. but apparently now that is not so (even the mac forums say that time machine is not a back up).

and since when did basic file management drag drop copy paste and delete become the power user forte? but now it seems effort is being made to obscure the file system from the user along with the files them selves.

 

[primetime]

let me ask you this. why you went with apple? I been told they make some kick ass laptops for work related on the go jobs as in there possibly easier to use. As for as home or on the job i dont see the appeal

 

[chaos4u]

Did not go with apple , this is a project with the goal of moving a older mac that became unstable and crash prone to a new mac. the user has decided that they like mac better .... they were hoping to bring everything from the old mac over to the new but that has not worked out to well. regardless - minus the photo database rebuild its just about done and hopefully i will not have to deal with another mac for a few months.


as far as their laptops . dont matter its still plagued with osx and its methodologies. i do not see how mac is easier to use then windows or a custom linux setup. mac always requires more clicks to get some where or requires arcane command control options bring up required menus and sometimes here is no option, you must go to the terminal and sudo something something -abcdefghijklmnop /somewhere over therainbow/your almost there/libary/somethingoranother.plist . the designers dont believe in right click menus, cut copy and paste is slower on mac especially with large amounts of files (calculating ...........) the finder drive me nuts as well as the whole windows management system of mac. sure it looks pretty but all the clicking and dragging grows tiresome quickly.

right now as it stands the old dell 6450 laptop i carry around for trouble shooting networks gets things done faster than the brand new core i5 fusion drive mac (albeit the dell does have a ssd in it) it still copys and pastes files quicker between a usb drive and the esata drive.

it moves file to the nas at 100mbs and the most amazing thing is it actually goes to the nas box in the browser by typing http://datatank:5000 the brand new mac ?? your forced to have type in the ip address and this is due to some kind of new dns that mac is using that guess what ?? the user dont have direct access to it one has to sudo vi - ahell screw it it is easier to just type the damn ip address . all though further reading shows it might be possible to .local.datatank:5000 but regardless why the hell it cant resolve local dns is just one of those things that remind you that your using a mac. and you have to think different now because functionality is something one does not need to get things accomplished.

 

[BulletDust]

I can't stand OS X.

Right now I've got an iMac here that runs a Windows XP virtual machine using Parallels. Now it has to be said that my client does not like OS X, but they like the 'screen on the Mac', 99% of the time they're happily running in the Windows XP VM.

The issue is that iTunes is no longer supported under XP, and it was no longer supported under the previous version of OS X (Yosemite?), so an upgrade to El Crappytain was necessary if the client wanted to continue using his iPhone (gag) with his Mac - No problem, shouldn't be an issue, perform a Time Machine backup just prior to the upgrade just in case, back up the VM itself 'just in case' and backup the clients business accounting 'just in case'....

...So, I perform the upgrade and guess what? The version of Parallels the client is running is not compatible with El Crappytain! And the client's accounting software runs under Windows XP, and based on experience 'it will only run on XP because it's shit'!

So now I need to migrate the VM to an alternate solution or inform the client that it's time to pay for an upgrade of Parallels! Why does everything under OS X equate to more $$?! You don't experience this under Linux (my daily OS) and I've never really even encountered this migrating from Windows 7 to 10....

...In summary, OS X sucks balls and everything under OS X seems to be a ploy to suck more hard earned $$ out of the back pocket of the consumer.

 

[chaos4u]

yeah the whole parallels forced upgrades really soured this person to the point that he bought office and we transferred his incredimail to outlook just so he no longered needed windows. and he really loved incredimail.

hopefully one day they will move back to a real computer .

 

[BulletDust]

It's a god damn joke! I just love Parallels pricing model, at minimum $100.00/yr subscription! Are you serious!

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Why not just install VirtualBox instead of Parallels? I mean, Parallels is pretty transparent about their pricing... seems weird to blame OS X for a 3rd party company's licensing scheme xD

I mean, don't let me get in the way of the Apple hatefest, just seems that a good amount of the issues brought up are either GUI-tastic or semantics.

 

[BulletDust]

Parallels integrates rather nicely with OSX and the customer is used to it. I use Virtualbox on my Linux PC, and while it works well it isn't as seamless as Parallels.

The reason for the blaming OS X for third party licencing schemes is because it's fairly rare to find a similar issue on Linux or even Windows for that matter. But when it comes to OS X, every time there's a major update you can't help but think "how much is this gonna cost me?"

 

[B00nie]

...So, I perform the upgrade and guess what? The version of Parallels the client is running is not compatible with El Crappytain! And the client's accounting software runs under Windows XP, and based on experience 'it will only run on XP because it's shit'!

So now I need to migrate the VM to an alternate solution or inform the client that it's time to pay for an upgrade of Parallels! Why does everything under OS X equate to more $$?! You don't experience this under Linux (my daily OS) and I've never really even encountered this migrating from Windows 7 to 10....

Why do you complain about OSX when Parallels chose to limit your version compatibility behind a paywall? Nothing to do with OSX. Also, are you actually saying that there has never been software on linux and/or windows that seized to work after an OS upgrade?

Apple and OSX are not for people who are cash stranded and looking for handouts. If you have money to pay for the stuff, it works like a dream averagely speaking. I'm in a lucky position to not have to pay any hardware or OS from my own pocket so I'm a very happy Mac user...

Chaos4u: The easyest way to migrate your Mac is most likely to use the free Carbon Copy Cloner software. Time machine is not really reliable when switching between machines.

 

[BulletDust]

Why do you complain about OSX when Parallels chose to limit your version compatibility behind a paywall? Nothing to do with OSX. Also, are you actually saying that there has never been software on linux and/or windows that seized to work after an OS upgrade?

Apple and OSX are not for people who are cash stranded and looking for handouts. If you have money to pay for the stuff, it works like a dream averagely speaking. I'm in a lucky position to not have to pay any hardware or OS from my own pocket so I'm a very happy Mac user...

Chaos4u: The easyest way to migrate your Mac is most likely to use the free Carbon Copy Cloner software. Time machine is not really reliable when switching between machines.

Off the top of my head, no....I can't think of any software I paid good money for that completely refused to even start as a result of an OS upgrade, especially under Linux, but just cannot for the life of me think of a comparable scenario under Windows either. And I never stated that the issue was directly related to the internal working of OS X, I stated that it appears to be more common on OS X. It has to be said, that the reason this upgrade was required in the first place was due to the fact that Apple's own iTunes refused to work on the previous version of OS X necessitating an OS upgrade.

Another odd limitation is the inability to copy files to an NTFS formatted external drive without third party software under El Captain?! Considering most people are going to be transferring files between OS X and Windows I find this to be a very odd decision - My Linux rig can read and write to an NTFS formatted partition just fine - In fact it's a feature I'd literally be lost without.

Perhaps I was a little harsh. As a daily Linux user I like the fact that OS X is based on FreeBSD which is, itself, based on Unix - So many of the terminal commands are remarkably similar, but their hardware, it's just not worth the obscene amounts of $$ even considering the awesome trackpad of the Macbook models (which has more to do with the OS than the hardware). And the fact that the newer models are totally unable to be upgraded in any way is just laughable.

And literally all of the Mac users I know are in no way overly wealthy, I think that's a bit of an exaggerated generalization....

 

[chaos4u]

it works like a dream averagely speaking..

Maybe below average but no mac is not a dream .

people with multiple usb drives hanging off their mac like an octopus multiple photo libraries they have to manually find and mount... osx upgrades that at apples whim will break photo just like they broke iphoto.

the ever regressing itunes and its increasing inability to deal with large mixed libraries

actually apple should just ditch their whole library methodology and just stick with a simple index file probably would serve them better .

a dream to me is opening up my photos and having access to everything . a dream to me is going to explorer and clicking on the drive and accessing the files i want now, not wondering if the usb drive is still hooked up because i had to play musical cables in order to hook up something else.


which addresses the issue at hand mac is not made to get thing done. it is a minimal os that goes to great lengths to strip the user of power and flexibility over their data to the point that they dont even know what their data is anymore.

and that is a terrible methodology to employ on your user base. the whole foundation of computers is based upon data and how we work with it . these attempt here in the past decade to abstract that, is a detriment to the user base of all computers.

and osx is the worse of the bunch .

so no mac is not a dream its basically for people who dont care about their data. and those who use mac that actually care about their data should really think twice about their platform of choice because the company damn sure dont care about your data and will trash it in a heart beat just to force their next wave of desired methodologies upon them.

as for the time machine thing , after this whole mess i started looking into alternatives (was seriously disappointed by acronis offering on mac, its terrible. thus why i tried machine this go around) i had also read about carbon copy good to hear recommendation will check it out thanks .

 

[primetime]

Most apple people i ever met couldn't even spell power user much less have an idea what it meant. Long as they can find the docs and photos is all they care about.

 

[chaos4u]

Its sad really .. when did knowing how to mange and work with your files become a power user thing ? in my mind a power user is some one who can write a script uses the cmd or terminal like a scalpel and automate several tasks at a time with 5 minutes of writing a simple script.

file managment was computer basics 101. i swear at times its seems we are regressing .

 

[Snoflo]

I had endless hell as an Apple Mac Pro user that ended in 2012. They say everything on a Mac "just works", but that wasn't my experience. Apple doesn't support its top-of-the-line Mac Pro very well letting driver foibles and other bugs linger for ages before fixing them. I checked the Mac Pro forum last month and I was disappointed to see the same things happening. Apple's focus is on the consumer side of things - as in - non-power users. I always found Mac OS X a little weird: never got used to program menus on the top of the screen instead of in the window itself.

 

[ManofGod]

Did not go with apple , this is a project with the goal of moving a older mac that became unstable and crash prone to a new mac. the user has decided that they like mac better .... they were hoping to bring everything from the old mac over to the new but that has not worked out to well. regardless - minus the photo database rebuild its just about done and hopefully i will not have to deal with another mac for a few months.


as far as their laptops . dont matter its still plagued with osx and its methodologies. i do not see how mac is easier to use then windows or a custom linux setup. mac always requires more clicks to get some where or requires arcane command control options bring up required menus and sometimes here is no option, you must go to the terminal and sudo something something -abcdefghijklmnop /somewhere over therainbow/your almost there/libary/somethingoranother.plist . the designers dont believe in right click menus, cut copy and paste is slower on mac especially with large amounts of files (calculating ...........) the finder drive me nuts as well as the whole windows management system of mac. sure it looks pretty but all the clicking and dragging grows tiresome quickly.

right now as it stands the old dell 6450 laptop i carry around for trouble shooting networks gets things done faster than the brand new core i5 fusion drive mac (albeit the dell does have a ssd in it) it still copys and pastes files quicker between a usb drive and the esata drive.

it moves file to the nas at 100mbs and the most amazing thing is it actually goes to the nas box in the browser by typing http://datatank:5000 the brand new mac ?? your forced to have type in the ip address and this is due to some kind of new dns that mac is using that guess what ?? the user dont have direct access to it one has to sudo vi - ahell screw it it is easier to just type the damn ip address . all though further reading shows it might be possible to .local.datatank:5000 but regardless why the hell it cant resolve local dns is just one of those things that remind you that your using a mac. and you have to think different now because functionality is something one does not need to get things accomplished.

Seriously, why did you not just pull the drive out of the old mac, hook it up with a usb adapter and use the Mac migration assistant during the setup process. As long as the old hard drive is in good enough shape, it will work fine. However, if the old hard drive is flaky with bad blocks, neither a Mac, Linux or Windows based machine would have had an easy time with it.

 

[BulletDust]

Seriously, why did you not just pull the drive out of the old mac, hook it up with a usb adapter and use the Mac migration assistant during the setup process. As long as the old hard drive is in good enough shape, it will work fine. However, if the old hard drive is flaky with bad blocks, neither a Mac, Linux or Windows based machine would have had an easy time with it.

Boot in recovery mode, Firewire cable between both Mac's, target disk mode, transfer data....

 

[B00nie]

Maybe below average but no mac is not a dream .

people with multiple usb drives hanging off their mac like an octopus

What? USB? Why? You mean poor people who can't afford a large enough Mac SSD to keep their stuff on.

Besides Mac users use thunderbolt drives.

 

[BulletDust]

What? USB? Why? You mean poor people who can't afford a large enough Mac SSD to keep their stuff on.

Besides Mac users use thunderbolt drives.

Is there a point to an expensive thunderbolt drive though? Can the 2.5" HDD in most external drives even saturate a USB 3.0 connection yet?

Considering the quantity of data I store, I doubt any Mac internal drive would be adequate and the lack of expandability would probably necessitate the use of external drives.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

If you really have that large or a storage requirement, why not go with a NAS? OS X will play nice with SMB / NFS / CIFS shares without an issue.

 

[BulletDust]

If you really have that large or a storage requirement, why not go with a NAS? OS X will play nice with SMB / NFS / CIFS shares without an issue.

Except in my situation, the NAS would most likely run the Linux kernel and I run GNU/Linux as my daily OS as it is (Ubuntu Mate 15.10), so may as well just stick with what works in the simplest way possible.

 

[B00nie]

Is there a point to an expensive thunderbolt drive though? Can the 2.5" HDD in most external drives even saturate a USB 3.0 connection yet?

Considering the quantity of data I store, I doubt any Mac internal drive would be adequate and the lack of expandability would probably necessitate the use of external drives.

Thunderbolt works great with external SSD drives. For a HDD it's no better than USB simply because the HDD is so slow to begin with.

The main advantage of going OSX instead of linux on the daily desktop is ease of setup and built in proprietary code that's not necessarily available on linux. I used to think Macs were complete nonsense until my associate went nuts over it and convinced us all to switch to macbooks. After some initial annoyance I liked a lot of stuff in OSX and its apps. Certain things were made so easy that going back to windows started to annoy more and more until I chose to limit my windows time only for gaming.

If I had to give up my mac now I would definately switch to some distro of linux instead of windows.

 

[BulletDust]

Thunderbolt works great with external SSD drives. For a HDD it's no better than USB simply because the HDD is so slow to begin with.

The main advantage of going OSX instead of linux on the daily desktop is ease of setup and built in proprietary code that's not necessarily available on linux. I used to think Macs were complete nonsense until my associate went nuts over it and convinced us all to switch to macbooks. After some initial annoyance I liked a lot of stuff in OSX and its apps. Certain things were made so easy that going back to windows started to annoy more and more until I chose to limit my windows time only for gaming.

If I had to give up my mac now I would definately switch to some distro of linux instead of windows.

I do a lot of work on Mac's, I like the fact that the OS is based around Unix and therefore share's a lot of terminal similarities to Linux - But that's literally where my love affair with the OS and the hardware ends. Everything I do on a daily basis, from book keeping/invoicing to typing up a letter or creating a webpage banner for my business I can do just as fast, if not faster under Linux, than I can on OS X.

And I have to say, I've never had an issue setting up a packaged distro...

I actually have a 2011 i7 Mac Pro, I have to have it in order to perform certain repairs on Mac's. But it dual boots Ubuntu Mate and that's the OS it runs 99% of the time. In the rare instance I need to use Windows, I run VMware Workstation 12 on my main Xeon based Linux workstation, start up my Windows VM on another workspace and switch between workspaces using the two buttons on my mouse - So much efficiency is gained when I can use the OS I prefer, but still copy/paste text/links and share files between OS's so easily.

 

[B00nie]

And I have to say, I've never had an issue setting up a packaged distro...

Well, certain printers, setting up netflix, pipelight etc. are not stuff that people know how to do straight out of windows (or if they're generally non IT oriented to start with). That's what I'm referring to.

 

[BulletDust]

To run Netflix you just download Chrome.

When I set up my printer I downloaded the .deb off the manufacturers site, installed the drivers just like I would under Windows, searched for the printer on the network - Done.

Not everything is easy to setup on OS X either, some functionality within OS X is downright confusing, especially when transitioning from Windows.

 

[B00nie]

To run Netflix you just download Chrome.

When I set up my printer I downloaded the .deb off the manufacturers site, installed the drivers just like I would under Windows, searched for the printer on the network - Done.

Not everything is easy to setup on OS X either, some functionality within OS X is downright confusing, especially when transitioning from Windows.

If it only was that easy There are a huge amount of printers that do not have proper linux support for example.

 

[BulletDust]

It's probably a lot better than you imagine.

The Brother range of printers has excellent support - In fact i run a small IT business and Brother printers are all I use and recommend due to their excellent support and reliability. There was an individual complaining a little while back about his Canon printer not working under Linux, when I researched, it was only the very cheap consumer grade bubble jet printers that weren't supported, I'd estimate the other 75% of their range was supported under Linux just fine. Epson's support is a little lacking, but I'm not a huge fan of Epson products anyway.

However, where manufacturer support is lacking there is generally open source drivers supplied with the OS that work just fine - Hell, I was able to get my circa 1999 HP Laserjet running via a 1995 Hp JetDirect print server in about 5 mins using open source drivers and the printer setup wizard and I used that as the main printer for my business for many years.

It's not difficult to do a bit of research before purchasing a printer to make sure it's the right one for your needs, in fact it's something I recommend with any hardware purchase. It's not that difficult to ensure decent OS support while doing so...

Esentially, a PC's a tool, use whatever OS/software that enables best use of the tool at the end of the day - In my case Linux is simply unbeatable and at this point in time I just cannot make do with anything else. But, who knows, needs may change and a platform shift may be necessary? I can't imagine myself using Windows full time though, just too virus/malware prone for my liking.

 

[B00nie]

It's probably a lot better than you imagine.

No it's not. I use linux daily myself (well, servers mostly). But I migrated my parents to linux a few years back and certain services gave a great pain to get running. Different online video services with DRM were the hardest ones. See my mother likes to watch online archives of local tv stations. Also their printer/scanner (Epson) required a proprietary driver install and some googling to find out which driver was suitable. It was not plug/play and the manufacturer had very vague generic drivers available. In the end I got them running but I did have to google to boredom to get the scanner running.

If I could have afforded it I would probably have moved them to macs. Linux was the second best option and all it cost was some of my time. After I migrated my parents I migrated my wifes parents also to linux. I got tired to fixing the endless malware/virus infections on their computers.

My mother actually got a brand new Win8 laptop a couple of years ago and she didn't want linux on it. Two weeks later she called 'ok you can put linux on this one too' as it was infected lol.

 

[CEpeep]

Any modern Epson printer is supported by Gutenprint on Mac and Linux. There's only a few brands (Brother is one of them) that don't have vendor-specific support in Gutenprint, but even those will work if you fallback to Postscript/Ghostscript mode. Unless you're using something obscure or awful (Lexmark, etc.) your printer is almost certainly supported on Linux or Mac using only open source drivers.

 

[ManofGod]

Boot in recovery mode, Firewire cable between both Mac's, target disk mode, transfer data....

Except that it might cause issues with permissions. However, that is a good thing to know, thanks. However, now that I think about it, does the newest Mac's even come with firewire anymore?

 

[CEpeep]

However, now that I think about it, does the newest Mac's even come with firewire anymore?

No, but Target Disk mode works over Thunderbolt as well.

 

[B00nie]

Any modern Epson printer is supported by Gutenprint on Mac and Linux. There's only a few brands (Brother is one of them) that don't have vendor-specific support in Gutenprint, but even those will work if you fallback to Postscript/Ghostscript mode. Unless you're using something obscure or awful (Lexmark, etc.) your printer is almost certainly supported on Linux or Mac using only open source drivers.

Unfortunately there was no 'Gutenscan' as the scanner part was the tough one.

It was also not my printer, theirs. And it was old. Nevertheless it was the printer that needed to be working, I was not going to buy them a new printer just because I chose to switch them half forcefully to linux.

 

[BulletDust]

No it's not. I use linux daily myself (well, servers mostly). But I migrated my parents to linux a few years back and certain services gave a great pain to get running. Different online video services with DRM were the hardest ones. See my mother likes to watch online archives of local tv stations. Also their printer/scanner (Epson) required a proprietary driver install and some googling to find out which driver was suitable. It was not plug/play and the manufacturer had very vague generic drivers available. In the end I got them running but I did have to google to boredom to get the scanner running.

If I could have afforded it I would probably have moved them to macs. Linux was the second best option and all it cost was some of my time. After I migrated my parents I migrated my wifes parents also to linux. I got tired to fixing the endless malware/virus infections on their computers.

My mother actually got a brand new Win8 laptop a couple of years ago and she didn't want linux on it. Two weeks later she called 'ok you can put linux on this one too' as it was infected lol.

I've never had an issue with printer compatibility. I plugged my Lide 200 Canoscan scanner in, it worked, I use Simple Scan (packaged with the distro) to scan all my invoices to PDF - It doesn't get much simpler than that.

As stated, Mac's are by no means trouble free and OS X is becoming a little too much like iOS for my liking.