Converting Mac/LF encoding to Latin1/LF

I'll never really get the concept behind the surfaces and default surfaces and no surfaces with recode. Anyway, this is how to convert a file with Mac encoding and LF linefeeds into Latin1 encoding and LF linefeeds:

recode mac/..l1 myfile.txt

Or convert UTF-8 to Latin1:

recode utf-8/..l1 myfile.txt

Will we ever be able to get rid of the OS dependent behavior like 'Mac text files have CR lineendings' (which is even wrong since Mac OS X)?