[HN Gopher] Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux...
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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
Author : ecliptik
Score : 413 points
Date : 2021-04-02 23:39 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cfenollosa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cfenollosa.com)
| acomjean wrote:
| I went from Mac to Linux at home.
|
| My experience as someone who uses Linux but isn't great at it, is
| that it works well as a desktop os.
|
| I'm lazy I willing to pay for simplicity so I bought a
| preinstalled Linux laptop. And it's been chugging along fine.
| Everything Works (excepting wake forms sleep when I close the lid
| sometimes, it's like gambling...but I manually suspend and that
| works)
|
| I takes a little research to figure out which application are
| available (I've heard of none of these video editors..) but I
| haven't had any issues. Libre office works great.
|
| I even got unreal engine compiled and running. It's pretty nice
| experience overall.
| christophilus wrote:
| Not sure what OS you're running (my guess is Ubuntu). I've had
| no issues with wake from sleep when using Fedora, FYI. My
| biggest complaint is the Nautilus file browser's address bar
| being mostly worthless, the Gnome terminal's inability to move
| tabs into a new window, and the inability to use normal copy /
| paste in the terminal (Elementary OS gets this right, and I run
| their terminal on Fedora now... I may look into running their
| file browser, too...)
| joelellis wrote:
| FYI, you can use ctrl+l to get the path bar as just plain
| text that you can edit.
| christophilus wrote:
| !!! Well, I'll be.
| acomjean wrote:
| It's pop!os which is Ubuntu with gnome.
|
| My laptop has an nvidia gpu and it works great. Even steam
| works will which was unexpected and made the machine more
| enjoyable although myself a little less productive on it.
|
| I always mean to try fedora.
| martinald wrote:
| I'd be interested to know why the author thinks apt-get is so
| much better than brew (honest question!). I've never had any
| problems with homebrew (even on M1 mixing and matching arm and
| intel binaries).
|
| I have however had many massive problems with apt-get,
| specifically getting a version of an app that's later that what's
| included in the distro. It usually ends up with a couple of PPAs
| that then don't work properly and brick the system.
|
| Homebrew in this regard is far better as all packages are
| "always" at the latest stable version and I imagine get more
| testing than some random PPA or backports repo.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Our code runs on Linux servers, our (business) customers all run
| Windows. I run a linux laptop as I don't want to introduce
| another stack into the mix.
| bArray wrote:
| This reminds me of the h3h3 video of a student dropping out of
| college because they couldn't install their Verizon CD on Ubuntu:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRWrmT0ovPE
| ossusermivami wrote:
| I have just switched back to Linux in January after over 10 years
| on OSX,
|
| I am quite an advanced user and usually write my
| plugins/extensions or software if i have something missing,
|
| Everything is fine when I started to figure the nightmare that is
| nvidia and being able to sign those to load in kernel, it's
| incredible how far linux has come since using it in the
| 90s/2000s,
|
| My only issue is not actually with Linux, it's with the hardware.
| Using it as desktop works just fine, but the laptop keyboard and
| mousepad is bloody clunky...
|
| So I still use my macbook when traveling or when I am out of
| work. Since I configure a magic keyboard on linux, i don't have
| much a context switch issue (except maybe Command+w Command+c/v
| and Control-Shift-c/v Alt+f4)
|
| Oh yeah the only thing driving me crazy is not having proper
| emacs keybinding all over OS, you can set this up for firefox but
| then select-all which is supposed to be alt+a is kinda clunky and
| does not seem to work all the time...
| flerchin wrote:
| Stop liking things I don't like!
| lrvick wrote:
| I honestly have not met another Linux user in Silicon Valley that
| actually lives here and I have been here 7 years.
|
| I have to fly to Germany and hang out at CCC to find people that
| know how to be productive with open source hacker-friendly
| software. It is even rare over there to meet a Mac user. I meet
| more FreeBSD users than Mac users in Europe.
|
| Meanwhile in the US It feels like at every new employer or client
| it is a PITA to get a Linux machine because no one has ever asked
| for one before. It is just assumed no one could possibly get a
| technical job done without Apple.
|
| I have been told multiple times that I need to use Apple so IT
| can help me when it breaks in spite of me literally being a Linux
| hardening specialist who even has a few lines in the kernel. I
| can maintain my own machine, thanks.
|
| I have even had people insist on sending me Apple laptops even if
| a Linux machine is approved just because they are so sure I am
| going to need it. I never do.
|
| Where are all of you hiding? I feel like I need a support group
| of people that also opped out of the cult.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I'm up in Canada using Linux for c/c++. Im no expert in Linux
| either. I just use mint pretty much out the box and it works
| awesome for me. I'm just too cheap to buy a MacBook and prefer
| desktops anyways. I understand that docker is bad on mac too,
| that seems like it'd be a big deal.
| kyledrake wrote:
| I have been a long term linux user, tried an M1 macbook air
| recently and actually switched back to linux (a 13" razer blade
| stealth). I found the linux laptop to actually be faster, more
| responsive, have better software for me (plenty of free
| alternatives that are Good Enough for my purposes, also it's
| linux and my servers run linux, so no weird OS crossover issues).
|
| To my incredible surprise, I actually feel that the linux
| laptop's trackpad works better than the one on the macbook! This
| was one of the big reasons I wanted to switch back to a macbook
| and I was extremely disappointed with the results. I was having
| serious issues even just selecting text with the trackpad on the
| macbook air.
|
| The author notes a 2-3 second delay in DNS lookups - I'm actually
| having that problem with my macbook, and not with my linux
| laptop, and I have no idea what weird Apple goop is causing it or
| how to fix it.
|
| To each their own I guess. I tried the new macbooks because of
| what everyone has been saying but was pretty disappointed in the
| experience, so much so that I was wondering if my macbook air was
| damaged somehow. The battery life was solid, though.
| miles wrote:
| > _For some reason Mail.app gets a lot of criticism, but it does
| almost everything well_
|
| Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15
| https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
|
| 513 comments, the last one which reads:
|
| "Adding to my previous post: Same issues with Mail on Catalina as
| on Big Sur 11.2.3. Mails keep vanishing."
| carlesfe wrote:
| Hello, author here.
|
| I knew that if this got posted to HN I'd need to explain myself
| more :)
|
| To address some of the top comments:
|
| - I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a
| Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a
| Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".
|
| However, this is missing the forest for the trees, because only a
| couple of the issues I mentioned were related to hardware. The
| main point of the article is software polish, not hardware
| compatibility. On the previous article where I decide which
| laptop to use I already mention that it's not an issue nowadays:
| https://cfenollosa.com/blog/how-i-moved-my-setup-from-a-mac-...
|
| - What is a power user? Indeed, the core point of the article. I
| tried to be as detailed as possible with my requirements. Saying
| it is "a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts" is a straw man.
|
| - apt-get vs other package managers. I've used rpm/yum, emerge,
| pkg_add, brew, and port. I found that apt-get is very fast and
| reliable. brew is embarrassingly slow and doesn't apply important
| changes to config files, just drops you a notice asking the user
| to do it.
|
| - The Mac also sucks. Yes indeed! That is why I ditched it for
| six months!
|
| - What about Windows? Well, I install Windows 10 regularly for
| other members of my team. I hate it. Not only you have to work
| around the software, you have to actively fight AGAINST the
| system and its dark patterns. Preinstalled crap, "fake" requiring
| a Live.com user for a local account, constant and unexpected
| reboots, telemetry... sorry, it's not for me.
|
| - Do you use Linux on your servers? Yes, indeed. Debian as base,
| then containers with Void.
|
| - Didn't you expect you'd need to change your workflow? Sure,
| that is why I stayed with Linux for six months and not two weeks.
| I gave myself time.
|
| By the way I have been using Linux non-stop since 1999, and 7
| years as my only system. I know the Linux-isms
|
| - Just do [the opposite of my requirements]. I wish!
|
| - How can you like Nautilus? I just said it's better than the
| Finder.
|
| - This is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a
| migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system. If you've
| never used a Mac, you probably can't relate because you don't
| know what you're missing (happened to me before I tried a Mac!)
|
| I'll hang around to answer more questions, thanks for all your
| feedback!
| bengalister wrote:
| I have been running Linux (Arch) with Gnome on a Dell XPS 13
| 9380 for the past 2 years and I did not face major issues.
|
| My first major complaint is the lack of fingerprint reader
| driver. It simply does not work.
|
| My desktop environment is Gnome on Wayland.
|
| The support of multiple monitors with different pixel densities
| is also problematic. You can set fractional scaling but the
| rendering was really blurry. So now I have a script that runs
| when I connect an external monitor that just changes text
| scaling in Gnome (usually when connected on an external monitor
| I don't use the laptop screen).
|
| Other than that I have better battery life than on Windows 10
| even if video hardware acceleration is less efficient than on
| Windows (firefox is the only browser supporting it). And for
| server side development which I occasionally do on my personal
| laptop, I vastly prefer Linux over Mac or Windows (even with
| WSL2).
| danmur wrote:
| I think at some point it's just hard to get used to something
| new. Linux to me is incredibly polished in terms of both UX and
| customisability, compared to both Windows and Mac (both of
| which I've used commercially for 5+ years). But I've been using
| linux on desktop and server for at least 20 years so I'm
| probably just not able to see some of the things people
| complain about (or they're just non-issues for me).
| guilamu wrote:
| All your points are valid as much as I can tell, but this one :
| "requiring a Live.com user for a local account,"
|
| You can create a local account without any live.com user by
| just disabling internet while installing windows. I know it's
| still working around the software... But it's still doable.
| carlesfe wrote:
| I fell for the trick. Once you set up networking, you can't
| un-setup it even with a reboot.
|
| Therefore, I had to disable the wifi in the bios. I felt
| fooled and it made me very angry.
| carlesfe wrote:
| Since a lot of people asked, some of my "power user"
| requirements:
|
| - Perfect support for HTML email with attachments, calendar
| invitations, and conversations
|
| - Use MS Office and Adobe Reader (with Wine in my case)
|
| - Perfect support for Google Meet, Teams, Slack and Zoom,
| including screen sharing (full screen or just a window)
|
| - Ability to customize the action for any keypress, combination
| of keys, mouse keys including the scroll wheel, and trackpad
| gestures.
|
| - A good way to manage a constant flow of notifications: chat,
| email, calendar/reminders, and such
|
| - Connectivity with bluetooth headsets. My Airpods microphone
| wouldn't work so I had to buy another brand of headphones.
|
| - Support for a Wacom tablet, it was good but it lost my
| settings on reboot
|
| - Local copy of Google Drive documents (did this with Insync, a
| paid tool)
|
| - Working with two clouds with the same user: work and
| personal. This includes unified inboxes and calendars, task
| lists, etc.
|
| If all I needed was to send plaintext email and edit code in
| vim I'd use OpenBSD ;)
| unix1 wrote:
| The blog post says
|
| > migrating to Linux is fine, but don't expect a better
| experience than the Mac.
|
| It seems that depends on what you do (and like). If you spend
| most of your time in Mail.app and previewing your files with
| Preview app _and_ you like those apps, then perhaps Mac OS is a
| good choice for you.
|
| I personally don't fall into those categories. I care more about
| the software development experience where Linux is a better
| option for me. In fact, I was a bit surprised that the blog post
| was from "Engineer, developer, entrepreneur" and there was no
| coverage of software engineering/development tools.
|
| Here are things I prefer on Linux (not in any particular order):
| docker actually runs without taking over half to all of the
| system, window manager behaves the way I configure it, Kate works
| better, it's closer to what's in production - I don't need to run
| another docker container do/test simple things or fight with Mac
| OS workarounds, most tools/packages I use are a simple command
| away - Linux package managers are better and have a lot more
| packages than Homebrew, all/most installed packages get updates
| automatically, GUI file managers and file open dialogs are better
| than the Finder app, app menus belong to their windows, fonts
| aren't extra blurry on external monitors, most software stack is
| open source - if I find a bug I can troubleshoot or even try
| fixing it, etc., etc.
|
| Things I liked better on a Mac: giant click anywhere touchpad
| (though tap-to-click feature was inadequate).
| mraza007 wrote:
| I feel mac touchpad is very topnotch but other than that I
| totally agree with the points you made about the linux
| wideareanetwork wrote:
| What's wrong with Mac? I love it.
|
| If find it really weird people could find great fault with OSX.
| nitsky wrote:
| For key mapping, I wish the author had discovered interception-
| tools. It is far more powerful and easy to use than karabiner.
|
| https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools
| carlesfe wrote:
| Didn't know them, thanks for the link!
| franklyt wrote:
| Very little support for W10 in here, which is understandable.
|
| I just recently switched back from a work Linux config and a
| hybrid Mac config to a full W10 config for a variety of reasons,
| the largest being that W10 is solid, performant and doesn't feel
| as limiting as Mac, or distracting and warty as Linux, when I'm
| programming.
| oblio wrote:
| I think that if you remove the crap preinstalled on Windows,
| which is trivial for an experienced Windows user, and you don't
| have a work laptop with a ton of corporate management-ware
| installed, Windows 10 is super snappy, stable and with WSL you
| also get quite a few Linux goodies.
|
| If you approach it with an open and flexible mind, it's at
| least equal to Linux or Mac desktops, for developers.
| jurschreuder wrote:
| If there was no OS pre-installed on laptops, everybody would use
| Linux.
| happyjack wrote:
| I thought this review was super fair and I really enjoyed his
| takes. I had a Macintosh from 2012-2016 and can definitely agree
| with many of his opinions (preview.app is amazing, notifications
| on Mac are amazing).
|
| I've been on / off Linux as a daily driver since 2009. I went off
| Linux during the Gnome 2 / Unity debacle, had to use Windows for
| engineering school (not compsci or "tech") and had a Mac mini in
| there (2012-2016). I agree with the author and I left Macintosh
| when I felt that Apple simple didn't care about their "computer"
| division anymore. With the M1 and new advancements in their
| desktop OS, I think Apple is starting to put more effort in their
| laptops / desktops again. I think apt-get is amazing as well and
| it would be cool to see a REAL package manager for MacOS.
|
| For what it's worth, I run RHEL workstation, use an iPhone, and
| have been thinking of getting a Macbook as "corporate
| compatibility layer" for when a client uses teams or MS office or
| some junk like that that has no browser or Linux support.
| pschastain wrote:
| I'm still bitter over the changes made to Preview.app post-
| Mavericks. Apple has hobbled some of their built-in apps for no
| apparent reason.
| afturkrull wrote:
| I have used Linux exclusively at home for years. Recently, I was
| very impressed with antiX Linux. Runs like the blazes on minimal
| hardware and highly configurable. For those used to a more busy
| desktop there's Ubuntu Mate or Lubuntu. A minimum version of
| Ubuntu, but not as minimum as antiX Linux.
|
| https://antixlinux.com/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/
| https://lubuntu.net/
| pabs3 wrote:
| I hear the elementary mail app has a conversation view, I haven't
| been able to get the elementary mail app working on other distros
| though.
|
| https://github.com/elementary/mail
| flobosg wrote:
| FWIW, the Elementary app started as a Geary fork, but if I'm
| not wrong it got a rewrite a while ago.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with
| a Win10+WSL2 setup.
|
| I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook
| Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a
| development workflow that will still for the forseeable future
| center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are
| seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight
| architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up.
| And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support
| more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things
| would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers
| to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn
| out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are
| looking extremely compelling.
| szhu wrote:
| Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they
| switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-
| hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means
| they won't screw this up.
| pfranz wrote:
| I basically did that for the first WSL. I occasionally helped
| friends install drivers or find their printer, but mostly
| didn't touch Windows from XP until I got a job using Win10. I
| used macOS at home Linux at work during that period. I wont
| comment on WSL because I haven't used v2 and it wasn't my
| biggest annoyance (it also doesn't sounds like v2 fixed the
| issues I had with it)
|
| Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed,
| OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot,
| installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now
| there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like
| archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to
| Windows 95.
|
| I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games
| and junk.
|
| I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the
| concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a
| download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward
| to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in
| BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more
| maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it
| didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I
| found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines.
|
| The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about
| in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had
| changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but
| personally I find myself liking those OSes more than
| Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their
| shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding
| them.
|
| I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an
| Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux
| natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have
| seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything
| worked.
|
| Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the
| way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various
| kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms.
|
| The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the
| opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work",
| and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was
| doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background
| would degrade the experience.
| throwanem wrote:
| A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2
| on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple
| and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day
| pickup.
|
| I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for
| something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I
| discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus
| preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus
| also it actually breaks virtualization so you can _only_ use
| WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so
| chown and symlinks don 't work.
|
| I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all
| those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox
| proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really
| don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe
| for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance
| to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have
| no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the
| moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
|
| Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I
| tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a
| dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2
| turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really
| sent me over the top.
|
| And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the
| occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1
| mini is an _excellent_ dev machine, blazing fast and
| unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that
| promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost
| 300 for the mini, and that 's with something like a 10x perf
| boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another
| year to make the jump.
| dsego wrote:
| Apparently WSL 1 is different, it's a layer between linux
| apps and the windows kernel. WSL 2 is not great, esp. file
| operations, that's why VSCode has a wsl plugin.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, I know, but I also hear WSL1 is super slow especially
| for Node, which is a big part of what my mentees want to
| learn - the major point of setting up that devenv at all
| was so I could use it for mentoring, and quite aside from
| my own impatience with flaky tech, I also don't want to
| waste a mentee's valuable time with nonsense on the part of
| the machine we're using as a teaching and learning tool.
|
| We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or
| an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on
| me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So,
| from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the
| money on a known good platform than spending any more time
| dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only
| questionably equal to the task.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| > I'd tolerate it if I had no better option.
|
| Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The
| experience is always better that running on a VM.
| throwanem wrote:
| The machine also has to run Lightroom.
| papaf wrote:
| You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can
| recommend one option that many people ignore but that
| works for well me.
|
| Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is
| getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual
| Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs
| without problems and they have usable performance.
|
| I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business
| using KVM.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm certainly better off with the Mac.
|
| Lightroom is an utter resource hog and practically
| unusable without GPU acceleration - reasonable given the
| 45-megabyte raws I develop in it, but still a constraint.
| Too, I use a physical edit controller that needs a driver
| of its own, and setting up USB passthrough is probably a
| hassle. Judging by the docs I've read, setting up GPU
| passthrough certainly is. Meanwhile, the Mac driver for
| that edit controller, compiled to x86_64 and not yet
| updated for arm64, works flawlessly and with no extra
| effort under Rosetta 2. (And Darktable isn't really an
| option - impressive as anything given the constraints the
| devs have to work under, but one of those constraints is
| relatively poor support for undocumented raw formats
| including those my cameras produce, so I can't get the
| same quality of results out of it that Lightroom gives
| me.)
|
| In general, I avoid sysadmin work wherever possible these
| days, as for example when I migrated to Fastmail in
| January after 17 years of self-hosting. Back when I set
| that up, I had more time than money, and an interest in
| learning how to do it, besides. These days I have more
| money than time, and already know very well how. So at
| this point it's just a question of the most efficient use
| of resources, and - in part because of that drive to
| learn new things, which I now apply to other technologies
| - obtaining more money has become fairly straightforward,
| while obtaining more time is of course impossible, human
| life lasting only as long as it does.
|
| Sure, by dint of enough effort, I could have got WSL2
| working acceptably, or get Lightroom running OK under
| virtualization, or whatever. But at this stage in my
| life, I can afford to spend money to not have to deal
| with those problems, so that was what I happily did.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect
|
| Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?
| input_sh wrote:
| No way I can list them all, but here's my top five:
|
| 1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't
| even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it
| shouldn't take _that_ long to launch something.
|
| 2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like
| three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation
| annoying.
|
| 3. It's like each app does its own thing with
| notifications. It _does_ have a decent notification system,
| it just happens that nobody really uses it.
|
| 4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run
| their own update checker in the background. I easily have
| 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something
| essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at
| least one of them doesn't have an icon!
|
| 5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it
| restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's
| gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to
| use it for like an hour or so.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Without invalidating the rest of your comment, 30 mins is way
| shorter than I consider a valid attempt at this. I'm happy to
| invest even months in achieving an optimal setup, as long as
| it gets there.
|
| Most of what I am interested in is a streamlined docker setup
| and WSL2 provides an amazing experience for that, with a
| single docker / container experience spanning both the
| Windows host and the linux VM. While there are still some
| issues with it I have reasonable confidence MS will sort out
| the sharing of memory and CPUs so that resources can be
| shared better b/w Win10 and Docker/Linux than you would ever
| get without a lot of work through VirtualBox.
|
| On the Windows side all I really need is a proper, native
| office experience. Working in a regulated industry there
| isn't really any room for less than 100% fidelity in handling
| official documents and forms. But I will never need to touch
| powershell or anything else from the native Win10 experience.
| pascalo wrote:
| I'm a Linux user on my own hardware and was just put onto win10
| at my current gig.
|
| WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I
| expected. But the rest of windows still sucks.
|
| As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting
| with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt
| like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire
| transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly
| between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a
| forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty
| support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to
| find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again.
|
| Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and
| moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google
| drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins.
| Everything works out of the box. Bliss.
|
| Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware
| issue.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| I was linux only until last year when someone convinced me to try
| a Mac. I have been very happy with it: it's way less intrusive
| than what I had pictured (I think prejudice against commercial
| OSes from my windows days). Memory and CPU issues that seem to
| crop up in ubuntu using desktop apps are not present - I had a
| lot of trouble using e.g. zoom and g-suite on ubuntu without
| having either lockups or full blast cooling fan. And I still have
| a unix-like OS that I can do my usual development, ssh-ing, and
| file manipulation on.
|
| I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu
| for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would
| be a Mac.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I was also Linux-only for several years, then I started getting
| into Macs and they felt more or less good enough. I definitely
| appreciated not spending as much time just to make my computer
| _work_ , and I liked the familiarity of the terminal. I started
| drifting back toward Linux as my Macs started to give out.
|
| The macOS installer kept failing and I had to jump through
| hoops to download the installer for the macOS version I wanted
| and 'verify' it. (This was ~10.10-10.13, not sure if it's still
| as much trouble to verify an installer that isn't the latest
| version.) After the second Mac that refused to reinstall, I had
| had enough and put Ubuntu on it.
|
| I started to realize around 2012 (with the release of soldered-
| RAM Retina MBPs and razor-edge discless iMacs) that Apple did
| not need me as a customer, and eventually I was fine with that.
| I have one remaining Mac Mini that I use as an HTPC and to get
| pictures off of my iPad. For daily use I usually prefer an old
| Thinkpad running Debian.
| hotcrossbunny wrote:
| Same here with regards to preferring the old Thinkpads for
| daily use. The trouble as I it is that the great ones are
| getting really old now, and the newer ones don't seem to be
| of the same ilk.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I picked up a W500 recently to replace my R61i, and while
| it's an incremental improvement it easily handles 80
| percent of what I need a computer to do. I'm planning to
| add a Bluetooth adapter to get that up to 90%, the rest
| being limitations of the Core2 Duo and graphics card.
|
| I'd maybe consider going a little newer and going to a T
| series but it sounds like they really started going
| downhill (build-wise) when they changed the keyboard. Even
| the W500 has a lot more keyboard flex than the R61i, in an
| attempt to add lightness to a chunky laptop.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| For all their faults there is one compelling feature of open and
| free systems: you have the source code for everything at your
| fingertips.
|
| The command line might give a similar feeling of having the whole
| system at your control but that's not really a differentiator
| these days with macOS.
|
| If (and realistically, only if) you are an engineer, having the
| source code is a killer feature.
| keenreed wrote:
| I tried to use MacOSX on my Dell XPS13. Installation was very
| difficult, driver support lacking and it often crashed. I find
| Linux much better.
| kristianp wrote:
| Did you get any help from Apple support? I hope you asked for
| your money back!
| mraza007 wrote:
| I switched to Linux when learning nodejs and web development in
| general. Setting up nodejs and using commandline was pain so I
| decided to completely switch to Ubuntu and never looked back and
| I consider that one of the best decisions I ever made.
|
| Now after getting tempted to try Arch Linux and I finally gave it
| a try and its been great so far and especially the Arch Wiki has
| been the best resource for all my linux knowledge
|
| I just can't thank enough whoever created ArchWiki Project it's
| full of great knowledge related to Linux.
|
| I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the efforts of people
| who contributed to archwiki and to linux project in general
| making it great for people like us to use it as a daily driver
| cdogl wrote:
| Indeed. Arch's disadvantages are obvious, but the educational
| contribution of the Arch community to all its users has been
| immense. Almost everyone technical that I know personally has
| really levelled up through it at some stage. I think Arch's
| detractors often miss its role in getting more people truly on
| board with Linux and OSS.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| What I would like to add is: bluetooth support and sound stuff.
| It feels like it's still an afterthought in the community and is
| still flaky at best.
|
| I think the main problem with linux on desktops shows quite
| perfectly in this thread. Good UX? Nah, why would we? Invest your
| own time, fiddle around until you settle on a mediocre and
| cumbersome solution.
|
| I've been using Arch for over 13 years now and over 10 years of
| MacBooks with a short break. It feels like the problems are still
| the same. Though the X auto configuration got way better.
|
| I love (especially) Arch though, but not the experience of using
| it on a day-to-day basis. I always miss pacman on macs, but I
| miss the UX on arch.
| sergeykish wrote:
| You are too harsh, good UX is subjective.
|
| I have not found anything better than wmii, last year
| replicated experience in xmonad now without any WM controls. My
| environment is clean and unobtrusive -- xterm, vim, mpv, mupdf.
| Arch Linux user since 2009. Recently I've tried Windows and
| macOS, can't stand them.
|
| There are other projects though -- Gnome, KDE, more mainstream
| approach.
| linza wrote:
| Operating systems and people's use cases seem to be so
| specialized that you will rarely see someone switch because they
| feel happier at the other side. Especially for professional work
| there seems to be "one true way" and emulating that on a
| different setup obviously has some productivity loss.
|
| It's a bit silly though to call out the author for not using the
| right linux laptop or being too hung up on their workflow. It's
| not unfair towards linux, the conversion of a macos power user
| was never meant to be!
| randomsearch wrote:
| I also carried out this experiment, mainly cos I couldn't afford
| a Mac for a while. Completely agree with all his comments except:
| the default terminal in Ubuntu is a gazillion times better than
| Mac and that makes a huge difference. But ultimately productivity
| suites matter, webmail sucks, and all of the email clients on
| Linux were awful. That's a showstopper for anyone doing a lot of
| office or management work.
| cpach wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, which mail client do you prefer?
| Mail.app?
| willtim wrote:
| > all of the email clients on Linux were awful
|
| Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy
| than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than
| iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because
| it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved
| her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.
| input_sh wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird for like a decade, but I've been
| spoiled by Fastmail's web interface so much that I now
| consider Thunderbird to be one giant mess from a UX
| perspective.
|
| Half the time I miss-click the first email and sort by
| subject. In what world would I want to sort my emails by
| subject!?
|
| Search vs. filter messages, I really don't need two search
| bars, one is fine.
|
| I'm annoyed that the default sort is oldest to newest, and
| that I have to change it for each individual folder.
|
| Tabs really don't fit into how I consume my email. Flagging
| important ones is good enough.
|
| I'd take Geary (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) over
| Thunderbird any day, but lack of GPG integration is what's
| forcing me to stick to Thunderbird.
| willtim wrote:
| Yes I agree, the UI is a mess and they have made some bad
| design decisions. One time I was on train with my network
| connection dropping constantly and Thunderbird was giving
| me a model pop-up dialogue each time! It still gives pop-
| ups for updates. But it's open-source, relatively stable
| and reliable, and that counts for a lot.
|
| The sad fact is that there is simply no money in building
| email clients. Email is a legacy technology and arguably no
| longer fit for purpose. We need a new standard and that's
| not something that BigTech has delivered yet.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| I have a hard time seeing, as a long time Linux user, how the
| default mac terminal is crap ? It's very responsive, fast, you
| have most of the features you need. That compared to the
| clunky, slow gnome terminal for example, or the many various
| RXVT xterm clones.
|
| Of course, you can install iTerm2 which is even better.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| The default Mac terminal is dogsh*t, but iTerm2 is great.
| holstvoogd wrote:
| I have the same experience. I bought a System76 darter pro, it
| comes with a linux pre-installed. I've been using it on and of
| for a year now but cannot 'give up' my mac: - It is not stable at
| all; weekly complete freezes - The key-bindings are a joke. Even
| after remapping and hacking stuff - bluetooth support sucks,
| sometimes it works for days, then it will not reconnect and keep
| spewing errors. - Sound drivers seems buggy, it takes 20-30s to
| 'switch' to a BT speaker. - I cannot for the life of me figure
| out how to install Ruby 'correctly' via apt.
| dalu wrote:
| You use rbenv.
|
| You don't sound very tech savvy, but using Ruby?
|
| It's weird how my workstations and desktops and laptops and
| netbooks all run Linux just fine, only you're having those
| issues.
|
| You're a joke. You're not adaptable. When in Rome...
|
| Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would
| otherwise cost 1k
| sbuk wrote:
| "You're a joke."
|
| Wow.
|
| "Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would
| otherwise cost 1k"
|
| Not this again. A fully tricked out MBP 16" costs $6699. RRP
| for a Lenovo equivalent is $8,894. Dell doesn't sell anything
| that matches, but equivalent spec is $3,894.99 (MBP 16"
| $4199). System 76 - $3,174 with a shit display (1080p in a
| 'high end' laptop is absolutely shocking). Librem 14 (vs MBP
| 13" for $2299), $2,716 - again, with a really poor screen,
| but now the Mac has a better processor and significantly
| better battery life. So, yet again, we illustrate that when
| you look for equivalent new spec of an Apple device, they
| cost about the same. There is always manufacturer refurbished
| or secondhand, much like every other laptop.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sbuk wrote:
| _" Didn't have the option to flag, and can't find an
| option to report 'bugs'."_
| _Microft wrote:
| Click the time on the comment (e.g. "2 hours ago") to go
| to the comment view. There is a "flag" link above the
| comment now.
| [deleted]
| sbuk wrote:
| Thank you. There wasn't when I clicked.
| dang wrote:
| You have the option to flag - everyone with > 30 karma
| does.
|
| The site guidelines contain a straightforward way to
| contact us.
|
| Even if the above sentences weren't true, it's still not
| ok to break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of
| what someone else has posted--so please don't do that.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site
| guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll
| follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Left desktop Linux for a Mac and I'm not going back. Everything
| just works. Docker for Mac plus brew install coreutils to get the
| gnu utilities I love from Linux user land and I'm good. Also
| magnet for window management and I don't need i3 (often I just
| split one terminal in iterm2). To each their own, though. I like
| the hardware, the Mac plays nice with all my homepods, and my
| AppleTV, and the trackpad is hands down the best ever and the
| keyboard is much improved.
| dschuetz wrote:
| I've heard that a lot: "If you complain about Linux then you
| installed it on the wrong computer, and you're using it wrong."
| Basically it's your fault when Linux doesn't work. Doesn't matter
| if 1 of 2000 packages or libraries has a system breaking bug.
| It's your fault if you "updated too soon", or "did not update
| yet". It's even your fault when bug reporting doesn't work the
| way the distribution maintainers designed it, because when the
| window manager throws errors randomly and you try to report it,
| the bug reporting crashes too. Because of "you must have done
| something wrong" and "why would you want to do that, use the
| website!".
|
| I use Linux because it gives me good if crude tools, not because
| it makes me happy to use them.
| dsego wrote:
| "You're using Ubuntu, you should use Pop OS/Mint/Fedora/new
| Fedora/new/old Debian, it's flawless". And "you are using
| Gnome, I haven't had any issues with KDE, Plasma, XFCE, i3,
| Mate, oh Enlightenment, Enlightenment is the best."Why are you
| using Geary/Thunderbird/LibreOffice, I do all my
| email/coding/music in emacs/vim, you never have to leave the
| terminal and it has worked fine for over 30 years." "Everyone
| knows VLC is buggy, use mpv... mpv is not working for you? You
| should use VLC, never had problems with it." "Linux is
| wonderful on my machine, once I recompiled my kernel to verxion
| xyz everything worked out of the box."
| dschuetz wrote:
| Yes, exactly. And the classic: "idk, works for me", cracks me
| up every single time.
| sergeykish wrote:
| And that's it, Linux allows to craft experience.
|
| Different philosophy. Linux -- everything is possible, some
| achievable. macOS/Windows -- some things allowed.
| jbirer wrote:
| I am someone who has recently transitioned from Mac to Linux.
|
| Here were my grievances with Mac:
|
| - Lack of absolute control over the system: In linux I can
| increase inotify watchers, use a local version of whatever CLI I
| am working with i.e Docker (Docker is uncomfortable to use on
| Mac), apply patches to kernel modules if I need em, apply
| bugfixes instantly etc
|
| - The keyboard for my Macbook Pro 2015 has become sticky and the
| keyboard for Macbook Air 2020 is too shallow and hard to press
| for me. My Thinkpad E15 seems to do it just right. I imagine this
| is even better on a superior model.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| > the keyboard for Macbook Air 2020 is too shallow and hard to
| press
|
| I had to temporarily switch back to my 2013 MPB while my 2019
| was in for repair (my fault, drink near laptop = bad idea) and
| was actually surprised how mushy the keys felt on it in
| comparison to the 2019. Of course it is a matter of taste, but
| IMO once you get used to it, the 2019/20 keyboards are actually
| the best Apple have made, so maybe it is worth persevering.
|
| Certainly a million miles from the butterfly disaster! That
| said, I mostly work with an external Microsoft Sculpt keyboard,
| which is probably more like the older MPB in feel.
| angrais wrote:
| Why do you find docker uncomfortable to use on OSX? Also, what
| CLI replacement do you use on Linux?
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Docker is installed different on Linux (as Docker Engine) vs.
| on Win and macOS (as Docker Desktop). A workflow or team
| assuming either would run into issues on the other. Most
| importantly Docker Engine runs as a service with root
| permissions whereas Docker Desktop implements a VM that hosts
| its services, with workflow implications for development
| where a host process and a container needs to communicate.
| evacchi wrote:
| I have used a Thinkpad T470s for 3 years at my current employer
| with Fedora and it worked quite well (including standby, multi-
| monitor support etc). However, I have just switched to a Mac, and
| I can only say I've been missing it. The consistency of the key
| combination, the polish of the desktop applications. It's little
| things but they do add up.
|
| When I first switched to the Linux machine, I first noticed every
| single papercut (e.g. warning messages that felt like errors).
| Then I grew more and more "tolerant" of these things. All in all,
| the experience was fine; but I never really loved it.
|
| Not to mention, if you pick a Mac you often care about the
| aesthetics of the chassis and display; my Thinkpad with its low-
| light matte display (with very poor performance in natural
| lighting conditions) and its brick-like appearance (someone love
| them, I honestly don't), it always struck me as pretty meh.
| city41 wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. I used to be a huge Apple
| fan, and all hardware I owned was Apple. I have since
| completely moved away from them due to how buggy everything is
| now. I use Ubuntu MATE on a Thinkpad and it works beautifully.
| I honestly have zero issues with it and absolutely love it.
| I've been using MATE for about 3 years now.
| rashkov wrote:
| In defense of the Thinkpad matte screen, in my experience it's
| fantastic to use outdoors in direct sunlight compared to a
| glass covered screen. Even with a much higher overall
| brightness, the glare just killed any visibility on my 2017
| dell xps.
|
| As for the many many paper cuts of Linux, it's a sacrifice I've
| accepted in exchange for having control over my desktop
| experience. It doesn't change out from under me over the many
| years that I've used Linux. With windows and Mac I always felt
| like I was one software update away from them changing
| something out from under me.
|
| The system administration and shell skills that I've picked up
| are an investment that keeps accruing over my entire software
| development career, and make me a more capable developer for
| being able to jump into infrastructure and devops concerns
| around the software that I write. I expect this knowledge will
| last me for decades more.
|
| The daily experience of using Linux is generally one of being
| more exposed to the internals of the system. You're only ever a
| thin layer above the kernel and its system calls.
|
| If the inner workings of an operating system are a mystery that
| you'd like to explore, then you will uncover those mysteries in
| the course of running Linux as your every day experience. The
| error messages and log files are obscure but they're always
| available.
|
| If you have a problem and you have the patience and persistence
| to dive into it, then the next layer of abstraction is
| available for you to explore. You live your virtual life in a
| workshop, with powerful tools scattered about. A few times a
| year you discover a new one and it becomes part of you.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> if you pick a Mac you often care about the aesthetics of the
| chassis and display
|
| I added a partition to one of my MacBooks and installed Linux
| on it, best of both worlds. It was surprisingly easy.
| vngzs wrote:
| You complain about power user tools, then list a bunch of Xorg
| tools. Xorg is dying; move to Wayland. I use Sway, but if you
| want something that's closer to a macOS power user experience,
| you should probably go with KDE[0].
|
| Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. Wayland has
| some rough edges, but the reality of the ecosystem is Xorg is
| dead and not coming back, and it's better to be a little ahead of
| the curve than behind it and complaining about things that are
| resolved on the other side.
|
| [0]: https://kde.org/
| boogies wrote:
| > Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland.
|
| TFA:
|
| > Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was
| solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.
| andor wrote:
| Tearing is one of the reasons why Wayland was started. "Every
| frame is perfect" was the goal, and they baked it into the
| design by making all updates atomic.
|
| That's why I doubt the author had a full Wayland setup
| running. Maybe the app ran via Xwayland or there was no
| Wayland at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protoc.
| ..
| linsomniac wrote:
| I'm a Linux fan, but I'm toying with the idea of getting one of
| the new Macs to replacement my Chromebook...
|
| For work I am very happy with my Linux setup. ~5-6 years ago I
| got a good chromebook as an experiment, and I really like it in
| general. Long battery life, good build, high res screen, good
| security model, not much mucking around on it. It's a $1K
| chromebook that I got almost half price because refurb.
|
| The double edged sword is that it's limited. There are benefits
| to that I don't expect much from it. But for anything beyond web
| browsing I just use it as an ssh terminal. It works fine there,
| but I haven't found a programming environment I can use on it.
| Note: It apparently will never support the Linux apps.
|
| Sometimes I make movies, and borrow my wife's Windows laptop to
| run Resolve on. It's worlds better than any of the video editors
| I've used on Linux, and I was never able to get Resolve working
| on Linux.
|
| So with the new Mac I was thinking maybe I should try one of
| those instead of the Chromebook? At the lower end of the
| spectrum, the price is comparable to a good Chromebook (and I was
| dissatisfied with the lower end Chromebooks). But, if I actually
| want to do video editing I need 1-2TB of storage, which pushes
| the price up close to $2K. But if I avoid upgrading both my
| laptop _AND_ personal desktop because of it... One option would
| be a lower end Mac and an external SSD. At least until I
| accidentally unplug it on the couch while editing a video.
|
| But for 95% of my personal use, the Chromebook is just great.
|
| What's a fella to do...
| edoloughlin wrote:
| The article seems to boils down to: a lot of proprietary software
| I like on the Mac doesn't exist on Linux
| rvz wrote:
| > If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read
| four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are
| going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate
| Karabiner and BTT much more.
|
| This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you.
| Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error'
| this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump
| occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for
| these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just
| work' like it should on macOS.
|
| > On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and
| released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1
| Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
|
| If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No
| need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.
|
| > The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very
| positive for me, but I do need my productivity.
|
| Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing
| around with my setup or window manager.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >ther than messing around or spending days playing around with
| my setup or window manager.
|
| I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works
| out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
|
| Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that
| customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac.
| Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"
|
| If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux
| wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like
| VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You
| can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for
| themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can
| look at open source software, which has a way higher
| compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1
| chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You
| can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run
| Linux are upgradable and repairable.
|
| If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles
| on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so
| valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line
| tools.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Ubuntu literally does not have an easy way to configure what
| happens when you close a laptop. I want it to hibernate
| instead of sleep. Someone else didn't want it to go to sleep
| at all. None of the settings options allow this. While
| Googling it for a friend the only result was running a few
| commands and changing some stuff in some config file. You
| cannot possibly expect a business analyst who hasn't even
| opened the terminal once in their life to not be immediately
| put off and scared by this. This is the advantage of Macs.
| They literally do just work
| dvdkon wrote:
| So, does "Just Work" now include easily accessible noob-
| proof configuration of the things you want? In that case,
| macOS doesn't Just Work for me, because I want to be able
| to see what apps are playing sound or recording and
| manually set them to different sinks/sources, maybe even
| have sound playing from multiple devices at the same time.
| On Linux with PulseAudio and pavucontrol, this is
| effortlessly configurable with an intuitive GUI. I'm not
| even sure this is possible on macOS.
|
| My point is, unless we agree on roughly what features are
| required, "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier.
| We all have different priorities, so we either have to
| accept that there's no universal way to evaluate OSs or
| agree on some subset that really should Just Work.
|
| By the way, KDE Plasma has pretty comprehensive GUI
| settings on power-related settings. I think having GNOME 3
| and Ubuntu be the de-facto standard Linux experience is
| actually harming the perception of desktop Linux. People
| switch expecting a customizable, power-user friendly
| experience and get a DE that's trying to be the opposite.
| dsego wrote:
| Try soundflower for mac. I think JACK audio also works on
| Mac/Win.
|
| > "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier.
|
| I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available
| video editor, sound recording software and office suite
| are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
|
| > sound playing from multiple devices at the same time
|
| This seems like a very niche use case. Along the lines of
| the usual nerdy response of linux being able to compile
| gcc or run vim and why would anyone use their computer
| for anything else.
| dvdkon wrote:
| > I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available
| video editor, sound recording software and office suite
| are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
|
| I'm not disputing that. It isn't hard to agree on what an
| average user definitely needs and therefore must work.
| The hard part is where to draw the line, what is still
| needed and what is niche.
|
| > This seems like a very niche use case.
|
| Maybe. But it's very much something an "average user"
| might want. It's actually something I want to be able to
| do so I can watch a film with my sister, each with our
| own headphones. That's a real user need, not something
| "meta" like the FLOSS things you mentioned (not a
| solution by itself, but something that can help a
| programmer fill that user need).
| aniforprez wrote:
| Everything you require is not in the least beginner user
| problems. I'm talking basic issues faced by a person who
| only views emails, looks at spreadsheets and word
| documents and opens their browser
| dvdkon wrote:
| I get that, and my setup is definitely not beginner-
| friendly. But I think we need to agree on what beginners
| actually do, because I wouldn't say customising power
| settings falls into that category.
|
| The problem as I see it is that even people who really
| are beginners sometimes want to reach for more advanced
| functionality, and different systems expose different
| advanced functions in a user-friendly way.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Firefox/Chromium, LibreOffice solves your list.
|
| And from my perspective "Just Works" means don't stand on
| my way, don't change under my feet.
| konart wrote:
| >If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing
| articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your
| time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few
| commaind line tools.
|
| "Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things
| about things I like!"
|
| > don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux
| works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
|
| Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different
| scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland
| is still broken.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| For every niche feature that you cant do on Linux, I can
| name a niche feature that you cant do on Mac. And for every
| reason that you tell me how its not an issue on Macs, I can
| also tell you that its not an issue on Linux.
|
| The point is that this is such a stupid conversation to
| have.
| danieldk wrote:
| _Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different
| scaling factor. Turns out X11 can 't handle this and
| Wayland is still broken_
|
| Actually, this works fine in Wayland. I have used Wayland
| without any issues with _amdgpu_ , including with mixed-DPI
| screens with GNOME's fractional scaling. However, things go
| downhill once you have to use X11 applications, and you
| typically do. E.g. JetBrains IDEs are a train wreck with
| fractional scaling enabled in GNOME on Wayland.
| konart wrote:
| That's the problem. This work fine in Wayland but some
| things that were working fine on X11 do not.
|
| In the end you just give a sigh and go back to you macOS
| (assuming you were trying to switch).
|
| PS: for me though linux distro share the same problems
| they had back when I was using Ubuntu and the Arch before
| 2013. Not much have changed since then. Linux on a
| home\work pc is still mostly about freedom but mostly not
| about well build human-to-machine interface.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| I did for work. Always had a screw-driver with me, in case the
| system frozze and i needed to remove the battery to get it
| working again, because the power button wouldn't restart it.
| Tryied to diagnose the error, but it wasn't cooling and other
| colleagues had it too- so i guess its just distro-crap. I suffer
| through it for open source, but it ain't something i can
| recommend.
| jchw wrote:
| One thing that Windows and macOS users will never understand
| about Linux, because they've never truly experienced it, is just
| how viscerally different the Linux experience is depending on
| your hardware. You don't really _need_ to go with a vendor like
| System76, and going with a fan favorite like Lenovo does not
| _guarantee_ a good experience, but seriously, Linux on a machine
| that runs it well is just not comparable to a machine that runs
| it poorly. The only good news is the count of machines that run
| Linux well increases over time. My Lenovo P51 used to be pretty
| piss poor, not so much anymore. Anyway, that's just one point,
| but still worth noting.
| nikanj wrote:
| In my experience, Linux PDF readers suck, and so do email
| clients. OpenOffice is not as good as Excel / Word. Not sure
| how changing the hardware would fix this.
|
| Most of the Linux complaints that I see are focused on the
| quality of the applications, not a driver support
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I've mentioned something similar elsewhere in this thread,
| but I really don't see why someone would choose Linux if
| their daily work revolved around marking up PDFs, editing
| Office documents and sending email.
|
| I do these things on occasion (maybe once a quarter). When
| the time comes I drop the file on a suitable machine, do the
| work there, and get back to my real job (writing software
| that runs on Linux).
|
| Conversely, if I was still developing iOS software, I would
| not insist on using a Linux or Microsoft machine. It's just
| not practical.
|
| I get that people think the PDF/Office/Email should be on-par
| with Apple/Microsoft on Linux...but they're just not. I wish
| they were too, but I'm not going to spend my time making a
| Preview quality Linux app. These are objectively hard things
| to do. Most folks developing for Linux have other priorities.
| celrod wrote:
| I've been using Linux almost exclusively for many years, and I
| had to google what screen tearing is after all the comments
| about it in this thread.
|
| I do get people's resistance to switch. I bought a M1 Mac Mini
| because I wanted to be able to test and optimize code for it,
| but found the difference in experience jarring enough that I
| enabled remote desktop and now mostly run code on it through
| ssh. I'm sure I could configure it to behave more like I'm used
| to, but, why bother? If things were flipped, and I was that
| comfortable with the Mac experience while Linux felt alien, I'd
| probably feel the same way.
| jchw wrote:
| Screen tearing is typically very difficult to avoid with
| proprietary NVIDIA, but I have no issues with my AMD setups
| running Linux. I suspect that is usually the main difference.
| celrod wrote:
| Ah. I have AMD GPUs on desktop, and integrated graphics on
| laptops.
| gbil wrote:
| While I agree with many things, since when Gnome = Linux? But
| maybe that is part of the problem
| topspin wrote:
| That's a big part of the problem. Someone with the ambition to
| write up their MacOS to Linux experience lost to the tarpit of
| Gnome.
| carlesfe wrote:
| Just after the intro:
|
| _I feel like I need to clarify that this is an article aimed
| at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope
| of a more polished system. As usual, personal experiences and
| requirements are subjective. I know that Ubuntu [?] Gnome [?]
| Linux. I also know that I 'm not entitled to anything,
| everybody is welcome to send patches. Just let me say that if
| you try to cherry-pick any single issue, you're missing the
| forest for the trees._
| jgavinray wrote:
| In reading this, I found it very misleading. The expectation is
| that the author's work flows is somehow impacted and slower
| because certain commercial software that said author has been
| become dependent on does not exist.
|
| The large blanket statements such as:
|
| "Power tools are more limited and more difficult to use",
|
| "Any advanced Mac user knows about Karabiner, BetterTouchTool,
| Choosy, Alfred, Automator, and more."
|
| "With Linux, you can achieve almost the same feature set, but it
| is harder and more limited."
|
| In this case, the author has limited themselves to what is
| commercially available. Or looking at their choice tools they
| mentioned, the wrong tool for the job.
|
| The entire review seems very biased in the context that the
| expectation is Linux should have the same tooling and UX as
| macOS. There is no mention on viewing other GUIs that could be
| tuned to better suit the expectations of the author.
| ggm wrote:
| So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's
| forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than
| brew.
|
| Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely.
| I can go with his whole write up, but not that.
|
| Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd
| onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which
| brew conforms to.
|
| I also totally get his preview/calendar/mail.app vibe. Mail.app
| is not getting better. But the trio are pretty rock solid. Post
| O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really, so it
| comes down to productivity apps and integration.
|
| And yea, I wish a decent gtk port into osx was a thing.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd
| onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which
| brew conforms to.
|
| _Brew_ conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package
| manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users
| don 't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are
| we talking about the same thing?
| messe wrote:
| > takes control of /usr/local/ for itself
|
| In fairness, so does ports/pkg/pkg_add on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| They require sudo to install stuff though, right?
| ggm wrote:
| Ok. You got me there. But, in my defence, most macs are run
| single user. If I'd done any login separation I'd probably be
| wincing at what I said there.
|
| Apt, yum, bundles, renamed packages at random, the whole
| -devel thing.. brrrr. Please, no.
|
| Macports lost out. Liked it, found it wasn't getting enough
| attention.
|
| Pkg on mac works pretty well
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense
| really
|
| Excel Online doesn't come close to the feature set or usability
| of Excel for Windows.
| ggm wrote:
| There's a great story in how much of the world runs in excel.
| I use it simplistically, but I make no pretence there aren't
| deep, complex use cases. Maybe because I use it
| simplistically it doesn't bother me how weak it is compared
| to native.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Right. Imagine an intermediate user of emacs, vim, sublime
| or vscode. They'd find switching to nano or notepad.exe
| pretty rough.
| ggm wrote:
| Yea, although for the Emacs user because all x11 apps
| acquire x11 through MIT's X10R4 idea of textbox edit
| norms, they get the in line text edit/move behaviour they
| expected on anybody's xorg app. Not such on notepad.exe
|
| Powershell doesn't do it for me, but that aside WSL
| might.
| ratww wrote:
| Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS.
|
| It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every
| 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't
| support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is
| mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are
| not available there anymore.
|
| In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the
| Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using
| Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq,
| z7, which took a couple minutes. Let's see how long until I
| cave. I'll probably try MacPorts.
| whateveracct wrote:
| `nix-env -i` and `nix-shell -p` can pretty much replace
| anything you need brew for
|
| and they do it way better
| grzm wrote:
| IIRC, nix is not yet supported for M1.
| astrange wrote:
| There were multiple successful package manager systems on
| macOS (MacPorts and fink) before brew came out. Brew hardly
| has any technical advantages over them except that maybe fink
| got stuck using an older version of dpkg/apt, and it made
| some new mistakes like installing in /usr/local.
|
| Instead what seemed to happen is a new generation of Rails
| developers got Macs, decided all their tools needed to be
| written in Ruby by hipsters with lumberjack beards, and so
| they didn't want to touch the old stuff.
| lupire wrote:
| > hipsters with lumberjack beards
|
| This makes me mistrust your judgement.
| hashkb wrote:
| Yes. Brew is a crutch, and so network hungry. Nobody cares,
| but if you move to the mountains and want to do software
| development, a Mac will grind to a halt every so often for
| myriad reasons decided by someone at Apple, or just some dev
| accustomed to 100mbps.
|
| Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to
| respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
| ggm wrote:
| Both of these experiences are completely unlike mine, but I
| guess that goes to the variances in what people want and
| use.
|
| The one thing I want in brew and don't have, is hugin.
| Nothing else I use is missing. Iterm and docker and other
| cask like installs can be ropey especially if they do
| update checks inside themselves.
|
| I, probably a very simplistic user compared to others.
| YMMV.
| nanis wrote:
| > Linux (Arch for me, but probably others)
|
| ArchLinux has been painless. although I must say I've not
| tried anything too cutting edge with the GUI. Even if you
| don't use Arch, the Wiki is invaluable.
| hashkb wrote:
| The wiki... Shows that community maintained resources
| don't have to suck.
|
| I'm just using Sway and yay all day. The blunt edge works
| for me.
|
| And, can't say this enough, please always keep in mind
| that your software may be used by someone with a slower
| connection or who may even be entirely offline sometimes.
| I deserve music while driving, and text is king. (Elon -
| starlink me please)
| nanis wrote:
| > I'll probably try MacPorts.
|
| I've been using MacPorts continuously for about 10 years now.
| It's been completely pain free. I think I ran into a single
| broken package in that time period.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I've been slowly transitioning to using nix for all my
| software installations on macOS: it's pretty nice to have one
| tool that can manage all my 3rd-party software; manage the
| configuration of a bunch of programs, via home-manager; and,
| with lorri and direnv, replace nvm/rbenv/etc.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions
| rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled
| versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes.
|
| This is the setup I prefer in a vacuum, although it depends
| on the stuff you need being available.
|
| I also do think MacPorts is quite good. It follows UNIX
| principles, and it doesn't try to take over the systems.
| Everything is contained in its own world inside /opt/.
| rrmm wrote:
| I got fed up and shifted fully to a Linux desktop and laptop
| setup like 20 years ago. Computers are silly devices and there is
| no end to the annoyances involved with them regardless of
| operating system.
|
| I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked
| the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks
| these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind.
| Hard edges persist in any environment though the particulars
| change. I am comfortable with the tradeoffs currently and luckily
| there are enough people using Linux to take care of most of the
| show stoppers fairly quickly.
| sound1 wrote:
| Agree here. I use Windows at work and use full time Linux on
| home desktop since 7 or 8 years. Both have bugs and annoyances
| but one thing that turns me off on windows is how computer
| becomes more and more sluggish as the time goes on with each
| update. Never had that issue with Linux. Updates might break a
| thing or two. I am okay with occasional break/fix but just
| can't get used to progressive sluggishness.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Emoji selector, Caffeine
|
| Those are built in to macOS and have been for years.
| dkersten wrote:
| As someone who has used Windows, Linux and Mac comprehensively
| over the years, and bounced between all three a few times, I can
| say that ALL operating systems have warts and problems. There is
| no such thing as a perfect operating system and its unreasonable
| to expect that any system will ever work 100% perfectly how you
| want. You also shouldn't expect to be able to get an operating-
| system-A experience on operating-system-B, if you want A, keep
| using A.
|
| However, I've found that with Linux, the "perfect" experience is
| much more under my control than it is with Mac or Windows.
|
| I've settled on using Sway (on Manjaro, but I also use Ubuntu on
| one laptop because I was lazy about finding drivers and it came
| with Ubuntu) and besides Windows games not running well on Proton
| on Wayland (for which I need to switch to X instead, where I just
| use gnome), its been a very stress-free and convenient
| environment for me.
| bradwood wrote:
| OP obviously didn't try i3. _duck_ :)
| carlesfe wrote:
| I used dwm as my main desktop for many years when I was a
| developer :)
| k__ wrote:
| Since I spent most of my time in browser apps now, there isn't
| much difference in day-to-day work anymore when switching between
| OS.
|
| Linux was good enough for the desktop 10 years ago and it only
| got better with more and more browser apps popping up since then.
|
| I hope with WebAssembly we will finally get better performance
| out of browser based apps and maybe even get rid of Windows for
| high-end games.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| When I read "I am an extreme power user, I use the keyboard" I
| stopped reading. I think these power users have an inflated sense
| of self and the writing is atrocious. No doubt he's a rockstar
| code ninja too.
| redshirtrob wrote:
| What I like about Linux over Mac is I can do just about anything
| I want. Apple puts guardrails up, or has weird technical reasons
| [0] why certain things just can't be done.
|
| On Linux, I know it's just a matter of perseverance to achieve my
| desired workflow. With Apple, I'm always left wondering if the
| problem is even solvable.
|
| That said, I'm quite a bit different from OP. I'm not concerned
| with marking up images with circles and arrows and a paragraph
| explaining what each one is. If that was my workflow, I think I'd
| be much happier on Mac as well.
|
| [0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-
| focus-f...
| pfranz wrote:
| I'm sure Gimp has its fans, but do people just not know about
| Krita? I'm not saying it's as fast/easy at small changes in
| Preview, but it's cross platform and mostly a drop-in for people
| who are familiar with Photoshop. I know people who use it on non-
| Linux platforms and chose it on its own merits, not giving any
| excuses because it's Open Source or ported from Linux--they
| probably don't even know.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| What he's looking for in his post is XnView or something
| similar. I faintly remember it as a clone ACDSee, it has a
| basic integrated editor.
|
| It's not really that popular on Linux though even though it was
| first released on *nix some 23 years ago. I don't think people
| generally recommend it, simply because they don't know it. It's
| more likely that you know ACDSee from Windows and decide to use
| something similar on Linux.
|
| So it's not necessarily his fault for not knowing it.
|
| https://www.xnview.com/en/
| thn-gap wrote:
| I've been using Krita for some time as a replacement of GIMP.
| However, I still don't understand how these programs are rather
| powerful and complete, and yet the text tool sucks in all of
| them.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Gimp's text tool was quite nice last time I checked. Krita's
| on the other hand is just horrible...
| distances wrote:
| I don't understand how you can be happy with the text tool.
| It's easily the worst part of Gimp for me. I can't even
| find a way to move the text around after entering the text,
| I always resort to resizing the box from two corners to
| emulate a move.
|
| I'm probably doing something wrong but this is the status
| after using Gimp as my only graphics editor for about 15
| years.
| mrj wrote:
| Yeah the only movable surface is the letter itself. I
| usually find myself zooming WAY in to be able to click on
| the letters so I can move, and then still sometimes miss
| and move the whole layer...
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Powerful text tools are to be found in vector graphics
| programs.
|
| I use Inkscape and Affinity Designer.
|
| YMMV
| smoldesu wrote:
| >apt-get was a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is
| still the best way to manage software today. brew is a mediocre
| replacement.
|
| While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs
| to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree
| that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the
| longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix
| system". Brew has distilled my fears into a sobering reality. The
| "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or
| slightly more consistent shortcut mapping, but none of this
| really matters to me when I can't use the software I want, and
| the OS is always second-guessing my authority. Maybe I've been
| spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype. Not even on my
| M1 Macbook Air.
| strategia wrote:
| You may like MacPorts. It is descended from BSD-style package
| managers.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I've given it a whirl, and while it's better than Brew,
| that's not a high bar to pass. Macports suffers from the same
| lack of software and strange idiosyncrasies that crop up in
| Brew, and it really doesn't justify it's place in my
| workflow.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| Used to use MacPorts for many, many years. But grew tired of
| it breaking important packages or just failing to update when
| doing macOS major version updates.
|
| Also, MacPorts can many times just fail to install a package
| or fail to update a series of dependencies. Good luck then
| getting your operation important packages running ..
|
| Anyway, switched to Brew completely a while ago when updating
| to Big Sur, so have no idea if Brew will also do the same
| thing over time, but at least their system seems more simple,
| which might result in less breakage.
| MrMan wrote:
| I switched to all Linux in my house a few years ago, it is a
| simpler and better existence overall. My kids laptops are mint,
| my wife is the only holdout on Mac. Mac is not bad, but for me
| it doesn't have a lot of advantages and has a lot of obvious
| disadvantages.
| akra wrote:
| People state consistent shortcut mapping is an advantage of
| using Mac but after 2 years of being required to use a Macbook
| Pro I'm not really sure about that - often they are more
| complicated IMO. I still miss built in Linux and Windows key
| mappings. For example Windows + Left to move the window on the
| left side of screen for side by side apps on the same screen.
| Great for remote demo's and coding sessions. Ctrl + Shift + F4
| to take a screen shot vs Linux PrtSc feels backwards at least
| to me. On the mouse pointer side with scroll direction most
| people I know also get a plugin to swap the scroll direction
| when they use their mouse and switch back to track pad. Another
| example - on VS Code very often the key bindings don't work on
| my Mac whereas on my Linux machine they work every time. My
| point is while I'm probably don't know all the tricks to learn
| since its not my platform of choice YMMV.
|
| I think the impression of "better key bindings" comes down to
| familiarity more than anything. Getting used to something else
| seems uncertain (it may never be as good despite learning
| investment) when you know on the other platform you can just
| "get things done fast".
| totesraunch wrote:
| There is a great app for your window move/resize issue called
| Moom.
|
| You can bind keys and mouse to window move/resize actions.
| smoldesu wrote:
| There's also great apps for rebinding window
| movement/resizing on Windows and Linux, but that's besides
| the point.
| jek0 wrote:
| On a mac I can't live without "Magnet" [1]. It lets you do
| organize your windows in half/thirds of screens with simple
| keystrokes. That should be part of the OS.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| I used Magnet extensively when I used a mac. There is no
| linux equivalent.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| The feature is typically included in the desktop
| environment on Linux (and Windows).
| smoldesu wrote:
| There are... hundreds of Linux equivalents. Magnet is a
| pretty boring Window manager anyways.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| have you tried i3 [1]?
|
| [1]: https://i3wm.org/
| anaganisk wrote:
| Ah the next stop would be outrage by Magnet folks, writing
| a blogpost on how Apple stole their app features and sent
| them out of business.
| Veen wrote:
| It's a risk every Mac and iOS developer takes and is
| aware of. Sherlocking has been a thing for decades.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It's not even a software development exclusive problem.
| You might create a product, sell it on Amazon and then
| notice Amazon sell its own AmazonBasics version of it
| after a while.
| fit2rule wrote:
| I use a hammerspoon script called "MiroWindowsManager",
| which works very well: local hyper =
| {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}
| hs.loadSpoon("MiroWindowsManager")
| hs.window.animationDuration = 0.3
| spoon.MiroWindowsManager:bindHotkeys({ up =
| {hyper, "up"}, right = {hyper, "right"},
| down = {hyper, "down"}, left = {hyper, "left"},
| fullscreen = {hyper, "f"} })
|
| https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I use Rectangle [0] for the same purpose, it has a few more
| bells and whistles and is open source. It does have a bit
| of a debounce problem on multiple screens though (one tap
| might move the window two positions).
|
| [0] https://rectangleapp.com
| maxwelldone wrote:
| I've been using Magnet forever and believe I bought it on
| sale for a dollar or very cheap. One of my best purchases.
| belthesar wrote:
| For Linux users on Gnome looking for similar functionality,
| I use the gTile extension to accomplish this. When I first
| got my ultrawide display on macOS, Divvy was critical to be
| able to do this. gTile was a similar enough replacement to
| get me my workflow back.
| akra wrote:
| Will try it out. Having said that it is on my Linux machine
| "for free". I'm not even quite sure if I'm allowed to use
| these paid apps on the Macbook Pro I've been given.
| piyiotisk wrote:
| I think the best mac app for managing windows using key
| bindings is https://rectangleapp.com/ . Also, is free and
| open source
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| Very nice. This is the only thing I miss from
| windows/linux. Thanks!
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I used a macbook for 2 years and the key binding is
| definitely less consistent than windows or linux. If nothing
| something as important as word navigation and word selection
| (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux and windows), is
| located in different modifiers (can't remember which),
| something along the lines of: move with command+arrow and
| select with option+shift+arrows.
|
| Drives me crazy every time, given that command + backspace
| deletes a word (and command +del deletes a word in the other
| direction).
| dmitriid wrote:
| Option + arrows: move by word
|
| Option + Shift + arrows: select by word
|
| Cmd + arrows: move to the end of the line
|
| Cmd + Shift + arrows: select to the end of the line
|
| Additionally you can still use the decades old
| Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E shortcuts almost everywhere (some custom text
| input reimplementations ignore this).
| akra wrote:
| But of course on a Win/Linux system you rarely need to
| use three fingers at once. On mac this is all too common
| for even the basic tasks you state.
|
| Shift + End: Select to the end of the line Home + End:
| Select to the beginning of the line Home or End: Move to
| beginning or end of line respectively.
|
| What's worse is when I plug in a keyboard with Home and
| End buttons on a recent Macbook Pro they still don't
| work. Do I need another plugin for that? Even if I do
| personally I don't find the Mac keyboard shortcuts better
| than Linux/Windows. Tbh after using Mac for 2 years
| running now every day at work I still don't quite get how
| people find it easier - I still wish personally for a
| Linux or even Windows machine to speed up my
| productivity.
|
| And that's because people prefer what they are familiar
| with them - the mental leap to jump to another way of
| working for most people isn't pleasant and isn't really
| worth the investment. Mac still feels like a "second
| language" to me just as Linux must feel to mac users -
| I'm always translating it back to "how do I do this
| Linux/Windows thing" in Mac. In the end Linux, Windows,
| and Mac are perfectly capable OS'es and the differences
| is marginal between them which makes switching difficult.
| But I do prefer my Linux machine these days - more just
| comes out of the box.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > But of course on a Win/Linux system you rarely need to
| use three fingers at once.
|
| On Windows the Window key is essentially removed from
| keyboard.
|
| On Linux you can use the Meta key, but I don't know how
| common that is.
|
| I find myself using a much wider range of shortcuts on
| Mac than on Windows or on Linux (though I rarely use
| Linux these days).
|
| It's a personal feeling, not real data :)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Additionally you can still use the decades old
| Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E shortcuts almost everywhere
|
| These are in fact Emacs keybindings and they date from
| early NeXTstep. OS X inherited them from NeXT.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I'm probably misremembering.
|
| How to delete word (back and forward?), maybe it's that
| one.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Yes, delete/backspace delete one letter (forward/backward
| respectively), Cmd+delete/backspace deletes a whole word.
| robenkleene wrote:
| > If nothing something as important as word navigation and
| word selection (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux
| and windows), is located in different modifiers (can't
| remember which), something along the lines of: move with
| command+arrow and select with option+shift+arrows.
|
| I think you're misremembering here, I don't think there are
| any macOS keyboard shortcuts that work like this. It's
| always shift plus the original keyboard shortcut to select.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| It could be! There is one that's hostile, but I can't
| remember which. I know for sure because my colleague
| switched back to a Mac and it's complaining about it
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yea, I think I've been through a similar thought process. Apple
| hardware is second to none and their machines do look awfully
| pretty. Macs have become the default engineering laptop in all
| the start ups I've been at in the past ~10 years but I never
| got to the point where I was really comfortable. I have grown
| to really love wsl 2 on windows in the past year that I've used
| it. To me it seems really elegant and has been a dream to work
| on. Most assume it's just a vm running on windows, but the
| integration it has between Linux and windows make it extremely
| powerful (eg from your Linux shell you can run windows
| executables, so you can do stuff like run powershell to write
| text to your windows clipboard or run 'code .' to open the
| windows vs code gui on your current working directory in wsl).
| I'm not sure if it would be best for everyone, but as an SRE
| it's great to have my Linux container have the same operating
| system my company uses in production so that I don't need to
| figure out how to do stuff on two different operating systems
| and I am just a lot more comfortable on centos.
| herbst wrote:
| I was honestly hyped when i got a MBP beast as developer
| machine after so many years of hearing mac is basically a
| luxury unix.
|
| I was and still am heavily dissappointed. This was ~2018 it
| looked exactly as boring as imagined, a desktop as intiuitive
| as windows 7s. The terminal felt at best strange, many settings
| and confirmation dialogs are simply not available via terminal,
| only hidden somewhere in their UIs. The hardware run hot every
| day, always and you could not use an external screen without
| waste cycling your battery to death. Honestly not impressed.
|
| Both mac and windows are like stuck in time compared to modern
| desktop approaches like gnome shell or recent kdes. If you are
| a shell guy to some degree no other os will justice
| sildur wrote:
| Honest question, what's the advantage of pacman over apt?
| pimeys wrote:
| Apt itself is great, but the PPA repos that make every dist
| upgrade more complex is kind of not nice. With pacman you
| have AUR and very simple package scripts, that lets you
| easily add whatever to your system that's not included in the
| distribution.
|
| With apt this is not that straightforward.
| zucker42 wrote:
| For me, the ease of use of PKGBUILD files makes it easier to
| interface external or modifird software with the system (this
| has led to success of the AUR).
| kaba0 wrote:
| Imo, both are kind of sucky. (Just install a gnome group on
| each, then remove it and install plasma and see how many non-
| used service whatever continues to be installed). Nix is the
| correct solution to the dependency hell problem.
| haolez wrote:
| Nix could allow for home installs, however. It would make
| it useful in a lot more situations.
| kaba0 wrote:
| What do you mean with home installs? Installing nix
| itself without root?
| craftinator wrote:
| > Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the
| hype.
|
| This type of sentiment is usually a sign. If you've been
| spoiled by something, that's because it's better. I had the
| same feeling trying to go back to windows, "Man, why am I
| always fighting damaging updates", "Why can't I change this
| very simple setting", "Where is the documentation for this
| file".
|
| The answer usually comes down to "because one thing is really
| good (not perfect), and the other thing is shitty (but tries to
| look perfect)."
| antihero wrote:
| > The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy
| or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping,
|
| I mean, not really, no.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation
|
| I recommend MacPorts instead. Brew broke my computer more than
| once.
| xtian wrote:
| What makes Homebrew a failure? I don't generally have issues
| with it for my needs.
| darkandbrooding wrote:
| There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites
| my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version
| ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install
| postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are
| installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew
| install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to
| be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was
| written.)
|
| Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out
| and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My
| script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because
| of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests
| pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second
| machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but
| because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the
| second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first
| machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different
| major version of postgresql.
|
| Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But
| consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem,
| tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog,
| and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else
| in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests
| are failing, but only for this one developer and only
| locally...
| randmeerkat wrote:
| Why not run a docker container locally with Postgres and
| code against that? Then everyone is using the same Postgres
| version.
| hysan wrote:
| We do this where I work and while it's great that it
| solves this problem, but Docker on macOS leaves much to
| be desired. The situation with filesystem performance is
| abysmal, and if you're unlucky, CPU usage can go through
| the roof even when running a few lightweight containers.
| koirapoika wrote:
| True that. I see them actively working on the issue,
| trying to improve the overall experience, which implies
| improvements, but also regressions.
| darkandbrooding wrote:
| That is my preferred solution and I think it works great.
| I have persuaded a couple of coworkers to switch, but
| only a couple so far.
|
| Containerized Postgres is a real win, but running
| OpenLDAP (+ custom schema) as a containerized application
| has measurably improved my quality of life. Kudos and
| great gratitude to the people behind
| https://github.com/osixia/docker-openldap
| anang wrote:
| If the solution to homebrews handling of major versions
| is to not use homebrew, I think it indicates there are
| issues.
|
| I think it should work like almost Linux distros where
| the major version is fixed for a release lifecycle, and
| any other installations require modification. So say brew
| install postgresql should always install 12, and if you
| want something else you have to add the version modifier.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| This is a side point but the docker suggestion is far
| cleaner if you work on multiple apps as you can easily
| configure and run multiple versions with Dockerfiles and
| compose files to be exactly right for each app, with only
| the plugins the specific app needs, data stored in a
| custom location for each app, and the ability to turn off
| postgres for an app. System postgres installs and
| upgrades are a needles pain for development.
|
| But I agree that's nothing to do with brew conversation.
| reader_mode wrote:
| Not just different apps but having multiple working
| environments for the same app - very useful when you
| wreck the db on a feature branch and need to jump to
| another to fix a bug etc.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Brew always had and always will have a rolling-release
| model. Pin your dependencies or don't, but you can't blame
| Brew for this situation.
| na85 wrote:
| Does apt solve that problem? If so, how?
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Homebrew is like running Debian unstable, the world
| underneath you is currently changing.
|
| Mac OS itself doesn't really have this problem since
| applications can bundle the exact version of their
| required frameworks, a bit like Ubuntu Snaps.
| andreareina wrote:
| Except dpgk/apt is pretty good about keeping track of
| what libraries are being used. I've had homebrew upgrade
| readline to the next major version, _uninstalling the
| version that all my other utilities were linked against_.
| Admittedly, this was years ago and I don 't know if that
| still happens; the experienced has soured me on homebrew
| and I actively avoid having to run the brew command and
| risking the same again.
| rudedogg wrote:
| This doesn't really answer the question does it?
|
| It's been a while since I used apt, but if I remember
| correctly you'd have the same problem the parent
| described, right?
|
| -------------------
|
| And regarding the 'name@version' criticism: If you want
| to stick to a version, how can you do it without
| specifying it?
| thayne wrote:
| > It's been a while since I used apt, but if I remember
| correctly you'd have the same problem the parent
| described, right?
|
| Only if you are running Debian Sid or equivalent.
| tenken wrote:
| For example Ubuntu X.Y LTS always use a pinner version of
| Apache 2.xxx and it will remain that version throughout
| that LTS release, such as 18.04. what they do for you is
| apply security patches and bump Apache 2.xxx.Y where Y is
| the security release applied patch. Apache stays at 2.xxx
| for the duration of that LTS and is considered the Stable
| version. Want something newer like Apache 3.x install
| from a PPA or an all-in-one bundled Snap package...
| darkandbrooding wrote:
| Apt sidesteps this problem because Debian-based releases
| are not rolling releases. Unless you install a custom
| PPA, if you are running Ubuntu 18.04 and you "apt-get
| install postgres" you will always get version 10.x. The
| major version number will not get bumped for Ubuntu
| 18.04.
|
| If want to use a version of postgres other than 10.x, you
| can either use a different version of Ubuntu or install a
| custom PPA.
|
| Apt's target audience is systems administrators.
| Homebrew's target audience is independent developers who
| might need to have four different versions of Postgresql
| installed simultaneously on their laptop, because they
| maintain Rails/Django/Node apps for four different
| clients who are each unwilling to upgrade for whatever
| reason.
|
| IMO homebrew is "messy" because it is trying to solve a
| harder problem. If there is such a thing as an average
| enterprise software developer, I would argue that
| homebrew is trying to solve problems that the enterprise
| developer does not have.
| koirapoika wrote:
| I think you could also utilize 'Brewfile' with pinned
| versions, where needed, and the latest available for the
| rest. I manage my environment this way when migrating from
| one work laptop to another. Works fine so far.
|
| Alternatively, you can create your own 'tap' to gain more
| control over some packages.
|
| For databases, I'd stick to running them as containers,
| too.
|
| Homebrew is not ideal, of course, but there are ways to
| achieve desired goals until we have something better.
| tticvs wrote:
| It's actually worse than you think since the @version
| notation needs to be explicitly marked by the maintainer of
| the package.
|
| If they don't do this then there is no easy way to install
| an older version of a package, you will have to get the old
| .rb file from the brew git history and execute it yourself.
| xrisk wrote:
| What you want to do is maintain a tap for your organization
| and pin formula versions there.
| ornornor wrote:
| Doesn't apt (for instance) work the same way? Or docker
| images without a tag? I'd you don't specify a version in
| each case then you get the latest available. I'd you want a
| specific version pinned then you should specify it. I think
| I don't see your point, works as intended. If you enforced
| mandatory version specification every time, you'd have to
| know exactly which version is which package for anything
| you install: apt install Firefox > nope won't work, instead
| you have to know what is today's latest Firefox version
| (changes every couple of days/weeks)
| thayne wrote:
| On most debian-based distros, most packages aren't
| upgraded to a new major version in the repos for a
| particular version of the OS. If a new version of
| postgres is released, it won't be added to the apt repos
| for the current stable debian, ubuntu, etc.
| distributions. Instead it will be included in the repo
| for the next major release of the distro.
|
| There are exceptions to that, for example browsers like
| Firefox and Chromium, but upgrading the major version of
| Firefox is _much_ less risky than upgrading the major
| version of postgresql.
|
| Rolling release distros like Debian Sid (and archlinux,
| though that doesn't use apt) don't work this way, which
| is why rolling release distros have a reputation for
| being less stable.
| Mandatum wrote:
| That's really interesting, does anyone have a book or
| blog post taking about this versioning and releasing
| strategy?
|
| I feel like as a new dev there's so much in engineering I
| could learn from that's already been solved and re-solved
| again and again or at least addressed by existing
| distribution systems.
|
| However the reading materials to learn about some of this
| stuff seems far and few or very niche, sitting on some
| cached blog post from the 90s..
| ahartmetz wrote:
| apt generally doesn't switch you to a new incompatible
| version of a package unless you upgrade your whole
| install. Browsers are not libraries and have special
| status due to their importance and having security and
| feature updates not separated.
| xgbi wrote:
| It's not really how apt works but rather how Debian
| works: you use apt with a specific release repository of
| Debian (stretch, buster or whatever ISO you installed).
|
| Debian is really strict about its releases and won't push
| a breaking change in a specific version of the OS.
|
| For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install
| the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security
| patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version
| without going sideways and add a specific repository for
| that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next
| release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for
| that.
|
| Brew is different in that it allows anybody to merge a
| new breaking version of the software you use, so `brew
| install htop` on Monday could give you the 2.x version,
| and on Tuesday will install the 3.0.0 version.
|
| You could maybe compare it to the rolling releases of
| Arch. But Arch has a better way of handling it than Brew:
| they test, they prepare, they communicate for bug
| changes..
|
| Brew would benefit from segmenting their offering, but
| you'd lose the bleeding-edginess of it. Really, if you
| want reproducible packaging on Mac, I'd use nix or
| docker. If you want convenience and edge, use brew and
| deal with it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install
| the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security
| patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version
| without going sideways and add a specific repository for
| that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next
| release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for
| that.
|
| Debian has an official backports repository if you want
| that behavior. It just gives you the freedom to choose.
| Rapzid wrote:
| "brew upgrade" caused no end of troubles. Let's just
| upgrade everything to the next major version(MySQL 5.6 ->
| 5.7).
|
| Tests failing.
| xrisk wrote:
| Why would you run brew upgrade if you don't want to
| upgrade packages? I don't understand.
| pimeys wrote:
| You'd expect MySQL 5.6.8 to upgrade to 5.6.12, not to
| 5.7...
| aniforprez wrote:
| I found it much worse that installing anything STILL by
| defaults upgrades literally everything. You have to
| actually set an ENV variable to stop this behaviour. My
| stuff constantly broke because I'd forget about this and
| install something else and a couple days later I'd go
| "what happened??"
| xrisk wrote:
| I don't think brew does this? What it does do is update
| its package definitions automatically.
| aniforprez wrote:
| It was doing this until recently when I set the env
| variable. It updates itself every time and then updates
| everything else too. Maybe I did something wrong to
| trigger this behaviour but it was definitely updating the
| packages
| jmholla wrote:
| I've seen the exact same behavior. I didn't realize it
| was behind an environment variable. I passed a package to
| the command and for the next week I was dealing with
| issues from everything being upgraded.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My thoughts too, home brew works just fine for me.
| sneak wrote:
| One of the things that debian maintainers do is patch out the
| phone-home spyware nonsense in most apps installable via apt.
|
| Homebrew actually went the other direction and embedded non-
| consensual spyware directly into the package manager itself.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| On top of my mind, I think of:
|
| Brew upgrade usually breaks stuff if it hasn't been updated
| in a couple of months, which is not the case for other
| package managers.
|
| Forced update on any command is really bad behavior.
| rz2k wrote:
| Per gp, I haven't used _Pacman_ in a long time, but when
| Arch was really popular I 'd have a virtual machine, ignore
| it for a few months, then updates usually failed or
| rendered the machine inoperable.
|
| The Arch wiki was so good that it inevitably included the
| exact problem and resolution already, but since I didn't
| have any important running systems I also might as well
| have reinstalled the whole thing. In which case I'd run
| into installation problems that were also perfectly covered
| in the Arch wiki.
| pimeys wrote:
| Nowadays you can install Arch to a zfs or btrfs subvolume
| and have snapshots before every update, so a failed
| update requires you to just reboot to the previous
| snapshot and do a rollback.
|
| NixOS has a similar strategy.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| I find Docker to replace the parts that suck about using
| brew. E.g. I would never install something like Postgres
| using brew again. Small command line tools sure, but anything
| with complex dependencies and where you might need multiple
| versions it's just better to use containers.
| zxexz wrote:
| I do the same thing, but it sucks having to literally
| dedicate a couple cores and a few gigs of RAM to a virtual
| machine.
|
| It's worth using nix on macos - takes a few hoops to get
| running, but it's worlds better than brew. Albeit, a fair
| bit more complex than docker.
| dmitriid wrote:
| My personal gripes:
|
| - updating the package index on each operation. I just want
| to install stuff, dammit. I don't need you to run git pull to
| update the gazillion package definitions
|
| - `brew update` and `brew upgrade` dichotomy. 99.9999999999%
| of the time I need to update/upgrade a package, not brew. If
| I ever needed to upgrade brew, I could run `brew update
| --brew` or something
| x0x0 wrote:
| (maybe this is my incorrect usage?)
|
| I had packages installed by brew that used readline 7. This
| went on fine for a while. At some point, brew installed
| something (at my direction) and moved to readline 8.
| Unbeknownst to me, readline 7 disappeared from my system!
| Tada, a pile of tools require reinstallation. Oh, and I
| didn't notice until weeks later when psql stopped working.
|
| I'm not the only one, at least...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063175
| andreareina wrote:
| Yup, same exact problem. Bunch of stuff depending on
| readline 7, install something that wants readline 8,
| everything breaks. What a faff.
| guessbest wrote:
| Macports is a system that installs in the /opt root folder to
| run along side your native applications without overwriting
| them, but it compiles each application as you install.
| Installations can be very slow. It seems like it was adopted
| from FreeBSD's ports system. Fink is more apt like but I
| haven't used it in years. All the packages are precompiled and
| the installations are much faster, but it seems out of date.
| For both packing systems all the code and installation packages
| are managed by volunteers so quality varies across packages.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > but it compiles each application as you install.
|
| No it doesn't. Hasn't been that way for years.
| guessbest wrote:
| I use it and it clearly compiles each package. Please read
| the FAQ.
|
| https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ
|
| > Is MacPorts Universal? MacPorts works on Apple Silicon as
| well as Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs, but, by default, the
| ports you install will be compiled only for the
| architecture you're currently running on. This means that
| if you migrate from, say, a PowerPC Mac to an Intel one and
| use Migration Assistant to copy your data to the new
| machine, you should reinstall all your ports on the new
| machine to rebuild them for Intel.
| npteljes wrote:
| >OS is always second-guessing my authority
|
| Very concise way to put it. I feel the same way. With FOSS I
| feel that I'm fighting _with_ the software, and with
| proprietary stuff I feel like I 'm fighting _against_ the
| software.
| sandgiant wrote:
| Can you explain briefly what the issues are around brew? I've
| been a Mac user for the past decade and I still remember the
| days of macports, so brew still feels like magic to me.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system".
|
| OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system".
|
| OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component
| buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS
| proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.
| vlozko wrote:
| Yes, it is real UNIX:
| https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ With the
| exception of 10.7, IIRC, it has been for over 15 years.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| They were even certified as of 10.5 as a true-to-god Unix
| system. They have been more unixy than Linux for a while!
|
| Unix, until Linux had made a breakthrough, was a proprietary
| system. The AT&T Unix, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, you name them.
| Openness of the source is not a defining characteristic.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| DEC, SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, etc. were all proprietary. So they
| weren't Unix either?
| jeswin wrote:
| If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after
| using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just
| like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh
| - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT.
|
| > but there are rough edges for the power user.
|
| > I am an extreme power user, ...
|
| > In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power
| tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much
| longer than it should have.
|
| It's very hard to define who a Power User is. But if you've spent
| a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on
| Linux than on macOS. For instance, it's easier to automate tasks
| with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with
| osascript.
|
| I use macOS only when I'm forced to - because the absolute
| fundamentals are broken. Finder is unbelievably bad compared to
| Nautilus, package management is terrible, limited ability to tile
| windows, not even a simple way to set up an Application launch
| shortcut out of the box (yeah, can do with Automator).
| karateka wrote:
| > Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus
|
| Whats so bad about finder?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not having used Nautilus, there's a bunch of bad things about
| the Finder I can complain about.
|
| The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari
| has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open
| folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder
| window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What
| happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window.
|
| There's no way to have Finder remember what size a window
| should be. There's a bunch of tricks that people post online
| of how you can have Finder remember a window size but they
| don't work. It might register it on a folder-level but then
| you run `open /path/to/directory` and it opens up a postage
| stamp sized window (even though it should open a tab).
|
| And where the hell is cut and paste?
| ibiza wrote:
| Cut & paste is Copy followed by Option-Paste: Cmd-C, nav to
| destination, Opt-Cmd-V
| aniforprez wrote:
| It's honestly surprising how absolutely horrible it is
| after years and the new Big Sur only have it a fresh coat
| of paint without fixing any of these issues
| vehemenz wrote:
| The only thing I can think of is that Finder doesn't support
| SFTP out of the box.
|
| It's a bit embarrassing that Apple doesn't support an entry-
| level feature like that, but otherwise Finder has been
| steadily improving for the past few years.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The ones that have bugged me today: It randomly forgets view
| preferences. There is something weird about SMB shares where
| they appear mounted but actually aren't. It doesn't have
| scroll bars in its default state.
|
| MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major
| warts, though the finder isn't my major gripe.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The scrollbar thing is system-wide, not Finder-specific:
| it's definitely a somewhat annoying default.
| nmlt wrote:
| Well, concerning SMB shares I had the same problem in
| Nautilus a few days ago.
| one2three4 wrote:
| UI. Add a shortcut to a folder. Go there. Now try to go to
| parent folder...
|
| Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to
| visible thumbnails?
|
| And more like that.
|
| These things should be intuitive and easy to do.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you, showing
| Thumbnails has an obvious button on the toolbar. Go to
| parent is harder, but I think for the sequence you describe
| there's a back button on the toolbar that will do what you
| want. Otherwise, you can use the breadcrumb bar at the
| bottom (can't remember if this is a default setting or not)
| or open the Go menu and learn that Command-Up is the
| shortcut for "parent directory". (A little later you
| discover this is symmetrical: Command-Up goes "up" out of
| the folder you're looking at, Command-Down goes "down" into
| the selected item.)
| nmlt wrote:
| >Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to
| visible thumbnails?
|
| It's really easy, or am I misunderstanding you? View -> as
| Icons. It even has a keyboard shortcut. Or press space bar
| while with the file selected.
| __david__ wrote:
| To go to the parent, command click on the title in the
| title bar of the window. I don't know how you'd ever guess
| that, but I remember it back from the Mac OS 9 days.
| nmlt wrote:
| Yeah, I am wondering about that too. Finder can rename
| multiple files and has a goto folder option. Edit: I couldn't
| find a goto option in Nautilus. I don't know how I missed
| batch rename in Nautilus... Still, if Nautilus has any
| advanced features, they're well hidden.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I agree, I've always found the Finder extremely usable,
| especially once you've taken a couple minutes to browse the
| menus and learn the Keyboard Shortcuts.
|
| One interesting thing I've noticed is that people don't
| seem to bother to look at the menus anymore: one of the
| first things I've always done with a new application (ever
| since Windows 3.1 on a Pentium 90) is open the menus and
| skim the menu items to figure out the basic functionality
| available.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| The feature I miss most on Linux is hitting space to get
| a preview of any file.
| nmlt wrote:
| Nautilus has sushi. It's not as good as Preview in MacOS
| but at least works similarily.
| Hamuko wrote:
| You mean Quick Look? Preview is the image viewer / PDF
| reader.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Preview is a gem on macOS, it's probably what I miss most
| when I use Windows.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Selecting multiple files and pressing F2 or "Rename
| Files..." under the context menu is about as intuitive for
| renaming multiple files as I can possibly imagine.
| nmlt wrote:
| You're right. I don't know how I missed that. Maybe it
| was dolphin or some other file manager...
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Yeah, typing a folder's address could be a bit more
| discoverable in Nautilus. You can press Ctrl+L (like a web
| browser), or just start typing a folder address that begins
| with / or ~ but you're right there's no visible clickable
| button.
|
| My experience is the other way round: it took me several
| minutes and much frustration to find a way to type a folder
| address in Finder.
| nmlt wrote:
| Yes! Thank you, that was the shortcut I was looking for.
| It isn't in the shortcut help.
| krzyk wrote:
| Both Finder nad Nautilus are bad. It's like using Explorer
| (not IE) in Windows.
|
| CLI makes it better and if more graphical view is required
| then Midnight Commander on Linux/Mac or Total Commander on
| windows.
|
| More about finder - why it doesn't show the whole path? It is
| like it was intentionally made not to trouble people with
| filesystems.
| ddevault wrote:
| Anyone who is a "extreme power user" is doomed to fail on any
| new platform. You should approach a new platform planning to
| learn and embrace what you find there, and become a _new_ power
| user. Trying to port over the most "extreme power user"
| workflows you're used to on one system is inevitably going to
| fail. This was doomed from the start.
| [deleted]
| Tainnor wrote:
| I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you
| partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and
| philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately
| and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems
| a little bit.
|
| For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like
| hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to
| modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous)
| [1].
|
| Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the
| terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that
| the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I
| always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a
| better terminal pre-installed.
|
| Package manager is better on Linux for system packages,
| applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist
| on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems).
| However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for
| dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often
| the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple
| versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux
| distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I
| mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package
| managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew
| install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of
| problems).
|
| In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to
| do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can
| break down quickly once you want something more custom. With
| Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15
| years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio
| problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are
| generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard
| to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that
| is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the
| annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after
| every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to
| miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's
| nothing you can do.
|
| [1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/
| yen223 wrote:
| > most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-
| installed.
|
| I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in
| terms of features. Any recommendations?
| lhl wrote:
| I tried a bunch of terminals and ended up switching from
| urxvt to termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite a
| few years back (mainly for it's better handling for
| refreshing certain curses style output).
|
| This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros
| and cons between some of the different options:
| https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/
| Tainnor wrote:
| iTerm is certainly good, but I was comparing it more to
| Terminal.app
|
| for my needs, gnome-terminal seems to be enough, although
| it might not have all the features that iTerm has
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS
| is really not very good and I always install iTerm2...
|
| Apple's terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT
| torture test and has support for double width and height
| attributes. Sadly, it doesn't do overlines and doesn't
| italicise my terminal font.
| vetinari wrote:
| And it still cannot display powerline characters correctly.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think it depends on a font supporting them correctly.
| I'm using a zsh prompt that uses them and it seems
| normal. Check https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font and let
| me know if it helps. I was thinking of adding the
| powerline symbols to the test renderings.
| vetinari wrote:
| The problem is not with font glyphs, but with colors.
| Background and foreground colors that should be the same
| aren't, they are different shades, thus some themes (such
| as powelevel9k/powerlevek10k) appear broken, see
| https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu
|
| And the line height -- it could be font, it could be
| terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono
| for Powerline).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Terminal allows fine tuning the spacing. I tried to
| optimise my font to look good on the default settings,
| but that doesn't always work and never works for every
| program.
| domano wrote:
| He used a XPS Dev Edition Laptop... Those are officially sold
| with Ubuntu
| robenkleene wrote:
| I'm curious what you mean by this:
|
| > For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell
| scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
|
| macOS is a Unix, so you can obviously automate it via shell
| scripts. `osascript` is just an additional option?
| uncledave wrote:
| I think "Linux supported" is a vague promise that should not be
| relied on. I had a T495s which is supported officially on
| Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. And it was quite frankly broken. Closing the
| lid didn't work, it drank batteries faster than windows by a
| mile and plugging in external displays caused the X server to
| crash.
|
| This is unfortunately every experience I've had with Linux on
| native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using
| it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the
| native OS and virtualise anything else.
| Veen wrote:
| > But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do
| many things faster on Linux than on macOS
|
| This may be true, but the article explicitly targets people
| moving from Mac to Linux, not people with years of Linux
| experience.
|
| I'm interested why you don't like Finder. It does the job for
| me. What do you think it's missing?
| stormbeta wrote:
| Speaking personally:
|
| * No ability to show thumbnails in folder icons
|
| * No ability to use single click + hover to highlight
|
| * Relative sizing feels way off - everything in Finder always
| seems to be simultaneously way too spaced out while also
| being way too small.
|
| * Never seems to remember view preferences properly, and
| often defaults to confusing arrangements.
|
| * Doesn't like to stay connected to network drives, despite
| any number of tricks I've tried.
|
| * The usual cut/paste/delete operations being needlessly
| complicated to perform
|
| I do prefer macOS overall, partly because I'm tired of having
| to constantly tweak and fix Linux whenever I try to use it as
| a desktop system, and because of things like iTerm2 and
| BetterTouchTool.
|
| But I really hate trying to do any kind of real file
| management with Finder, and most third-party apps I've tried
| just seem to replicate everything I dislike about Finder.
| m12k wrote:
| I can't speak for GP, but I'd pay for Path Finder even if all
| it did was give me cmd-x to cut, and enter key to mean open
| instead of rename. It does a ton more, but those two are the
| killer features for me (Tabs used to be one too, but Finder
| finally got those a while ago).
| [deleted]
| Veen wrote:
| I definitely agree with you on the lack of cmd-x for cut.
| However, you can do cmd-c to copy, and then cmd-option-v to
| move files rather than copy them.
|
| Enter to rename and cmd-o to open was hard to adapt to when
| I moved from Windows, but it's second nature now.
| krrrh wrote:
| Using the distinction of paste as copy vs paste as move,
| instead of overloading the cut metaphor is a better
| choice semantically. When you cut text or images from a
| document with ctrl/cmd-x the content is deleted
| immediately. It's weird and inconsistent that in windows
| the files get greyed out and if you don't paste them
| they... eventually look normal again when you put
| something else in the clipboard? Modifying the paste with
| option on mac is also consistenT with option switching
| between move and copy while dragging files.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| My anecdote. Few weeks ago I bought Dell Latitude 3410. It's an
| extremely cheap (and underpowered) 13" laptop. I upgraded RAM
| and installed M.2 SSD. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 pre-installed
| (which contained a dozen of dell-specific packages). I
| installed Fedora 33 and checked everything I could check. Every
| bit of hardware worked correctly out of the box, so I'm pretty
| happy so far. And despite being underpowered, it's very fast
| and snappy, definitely faster than my old Macbook in day-to-day
| usage.
|
| I paid $600 for laptop and $150 for RAM and SSD upgrades.
| Comparable Macbook Air would cost $2000 for me.
|
| It does have terrible TN screen, cheap touchpad and bad
| keyboard layout. That's good enough for me, as I prefer
| external everything in day-to-day use.
| linuxdesktopfo wrote:
| > If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after
| using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example)
|
| I bought a Lenovo specifically since they mentioned all their
| laptops will support Linux in the future.
|
| Note that historically Lenovo didn't really "support" Linux.
| Remember the Windows tax and how most Thinkpads came with
| Windows and most still do? Thinkpads supported Linux _in spite_
| of Lenovo / IBM.
|
| Anyhoo, my new Lenovo had to wait a few months until the
| trackpad worked! Turns out Lenovo only meant that _business_
| laptops (or some other sub-category) will support Linux out of
| the box. Silly me.
| csomar wrote:
| Power user according to the OP seems to be having a bunch of
| shortcut keys.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I never understood how someone can make a good-faith effort to
| document their Linux experiences and for people to label it
| "complaining".
| aniforprez wrote:
| Welcome to the Linux community where every year is the "year
| of the Linux desktop"
| nix23 wrote:
| Well it is/was already, it runs google-chrome as a Runtime-
| Environment.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| He specifically targeted the "complain about linux drivers"
| part in his comment didn't he? He didn't dismantle the entire
| post, just comment on a specific part he disagreed with. I
| don't fully agree with it, especially since things such
| suspend, the fingerprint scanner and the LTE modem were still
| a mystery to be solved with the x1c6/7.
|
| But if anything, your attitude that's effectively shutting
| down any criticism is the problem.
| carlesfe wrote:
| I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a
| Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a
| Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".
| jmkni wrote:
| Dell don't sell any machines with Linux on them in the UK
| anymore (as far as I can tell).
| jeswin wrote:
| > Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was
| solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.
|
| Since you mentioned Dell XPS, I'm thinking they'd have sold
| it to you with Ubuntu 20.04. But why did you choose Wayland -
| which IIRC is not the default in 20.04? These are the
| trickiest pieces of the distro, and will take years to
| stabilize. Especially considering that Linux aims to work
| across the entire set of PCs in existence.
| carlesfe wrote:
| It is a 2018 Dell XPS. It had a previous version
| preinstalled, which used Wayland. I explicitly remember
| having to edit the settings to run with Xorg because
| otherwise screen sharing in Google Meet would not work.
|
| I upgraded to 20.04 at some point. During the six months I
| tried both environments. I ended up with Xorg just because
| it works.
| nix23 wrote:
| Unbelievable how the Linux community makes excuses (on the
| desktop) instead of fixing shitty software...it's always
| the same....
| matwood wrote:
| > For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell
| scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
|
| Are you talking about automating UI tasks in linux? Nearly all
| of my linux shell scripts work fine on macOS and vice versa
| unless they are using something OS specific.
|
| While not perfect, with macOS I get a large majority of what
| makes Unix nice while also avoiding the UI annoyances. Using
| macOS also tends to give more software options over unix/linux
| alone, like PS, LR, the Affinity toolset, etc...
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| _If you 're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after
| using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example)._
|
| So I Googled "laptops supported by Linux". There is no official
| site. Ubuntu has a page. But it's not on the first page of
| results. I only know about it because I'm familiar with it.
|
| Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I'm
| on Linux right now, but people have better things to do. Either
| provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all
| complaints are valid.
|
| Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it. Windows
| supports everything and has their logo everywhere.
| shaan7 wrote:
| > Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy,
| or all complaints are valid.
|
| Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux
| that work out of the box:
|
| Dell XPS 13
|
| ThinkPad T14s
|
| Or more generally, you can extend that to _any_ ThinkPad or
| Dell device _without a dedicated graphics card_ and you will
| have a good Linux experience. OP somehow has issues on XPS
| 13, probably due to meddling with too many things. My XPS 13
| (9360) has everything working out of the box with Ubuntu
| 20.04
|
| A very good idea if you want to confirm just before placing
| an order is to google "<laptop name> Arch Linux wiki" which
| will take you to the Arch wiki page for that device. There
| you can see if there are any known compatibility issues.
|
| The Ubuntu certified devices page is pretty good as well.
|
| > Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it.
|
| For Linux Dell and Lenovo do that too (in most regions these
| days).
|
| From what I understand from the blog post, the author is
| expecting Linux and the software to behave the same as macOS.
| That is just comparing apples and oranges. If you want a
| system that you are used to, you should probably stick to
| that. As in, if macOS works for you, I see no reason you
| should switch to Linux. I used a Mac for ~5 years before
| finally giving up because I just hated the window management
| (among other things). But hey, that does not need to apply to
| everyone.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| I have XPS 9380, and it's far from ideal:
|
| - when using external display, video tearing would be
| visible either on internal or external display
|
| - Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for
| different displays, and Wayland has other issues
|
| - battery life is shorter than on Windows
|
| - graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome
| (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)
|
| - touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on
| Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many
| solutions, using it on Windows feels better)
| freebuju wrote:
| Video tearing could be because of xorg. Try Wayland with
| HW decode, you have to manually enable it. Both chrome &
| Firefox support this now.
|
| My experience is different from yours. With Wayland I had
| smoother graphics than xorg.
| shaan7 wrote:
| Interesting. Apart from the per-display scaling (which is
| basically a Xorg limitation as you said) I had the
| opposite experience on my XPS 13. At the end I did not
| want a 4K display but Dell did not offer me the option.
| So I just used 1080p scaled most of the time.
|
| Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while
| Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the
| fan would always be running even without any significant
| activity in Resource Monitor.
|
| I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though,
| and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with
| monitor disconnected though, due to what you described
| earlier).
|
| Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some
| tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too
| fast sometimes).
| akvadrako wrote:
| > _Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad
| or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you
| will have a good Linux experience._
|
| That isn't true. The X1 Carbon from 2019 didn't have a
| working microphone driver for over a year.
|
| If you care about Linux you should only buy a machine with
| Linux preinstalled and officially supported.
| shaan7 wrote:
| Interesting. My wife got a X1 Carbon in 2016, that worked
| out-of-the-box too. Wonder what they screwed up in 2019.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| It's fair to say you could google 'laptops that come with
| Linux', which will give you a list of laptops from major
| vendors with ootb Linux.
| redshirtrob wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what would qualify as an "official site"
| for laptops supported by Linux? Would it be run by Linus
| Torvalds, Alan Cox, or some other maintainer? I think
| expecting anything official or authoritative from the Linux
| side is missing the boat.
|
| What you're looking for is hardware vendors who support a
| Linux desktop environment on their laptops, which are not too
| difficult to find.
| fulafel wrote:
| The poster wasn't using Linux to refer to the Linux kernel
| here - they used it to mean "a Linux distribution".
| Distributions have their own hardware compatibility
| documentation systems. Eg Ubuntu has this:
| https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and Red Hat has
| https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware .
| redshirtrob wrote:
| Hence my question. Per site guidelines I assumed the most
| generous interpretation of the poster's comment, which to
| me means they found those sites and do not consider them
| official. In that light, I was curious what they would
| consider official.
|
| I prefer to take a hardware vendor's opinion as to
| whether that hardware is supported by Linux. They have
| some skin in the game, and have the resources to test the
| hardware, whereas many Linux distros will rely on user
| reports.
|
| I imagine Ubuntu and Redhat have more resources to
| validate hardware and so those sites are likely more
| reliable, but once you get to niche distros YMMV on their
| compatibility matrices.
| joana035 wrote:
| https://linux-hardware.org/ here you go.
| Jonnax wrote:
| https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-
| fo...
|
| This is Lenovo's list of laptops with the minimum versions of
| Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu they support.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Again, that's like googling "laptops supported by MacOS" and
| expecting to find a list of Hackintosh compatible hardware.
| Dell and Lenovo both sell laptops pre-installed with Linux,
| and there are also boutique shops like System76 and TUXEDO.
| And I DDGed "Linux Laptops" and got all these suggestions.
|
| Of course, Linux doesn't quite have the mass market consumer
| experience you get with MacOS or Windows, but it's not
| exactly hard to find laptops pre-installed with Linux.
| hurril wrote:
| No it is absolutely not. That googling will find a list of
| hardware supported by Hackintosh and it will find Apple.
| Two very good responses.
|
| Laptops supported by Linux provides neither.
| seniorivn wrote:
| if ddg got desired results and your google didn't, it's
| an issue with google and how it serves you
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I'm all for bashing Desktop Linux but this statement is
| just ridiculous. Searching for exactly that search term
| gives me the following result:
|
| >Best Linux Laptops
|
| >
|
| > Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (8th Generation) Last year,
|
| >Lenovo shocked the Linux community by announcing Linux
|
| >laptops. ...
|
| > Tuxedo Pulse 14 Gen 1. ...
|
| > System76 Serval WS. ...
|
| > Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition 2020. ...
|
| > Purism Librem 14. ...
|
| > System76 Galago Pro. ...
|
| > Lenovo ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation. ...
|
| > DELL Inspiron 15 3000.
|
| >
|
| >More items...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-
| b-d&q=Laptops+s...
| hurril wrote:
| Are they supported, though? That was the question.
| Downvote me all you want, put words in my mouth if that
| is what you need to do, etc.
|
| A. But are they supported and is that a meaningful
| question? B. I am not bashing anything Linux because I
| don't hate it in the slightest. C. Did you read the
| parent I responded to? That comment makes two claims and
| tries to establish an analogous relation and that does
| not work the way the author wanted. That was also my
| reply.
|
| So you missed the point of that post, you missed the
| point of mine and you strawmanned me :)
| cycomanic wrote:
| Several of the laptops mentioned are vendors who sell
| them officially with Linux support (system 76, dell
| developer edition, purism...) , so you either didn't
| bother or trying to create a false narrative
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yep, from a third party site. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's
| not true.
|
| I don't have to double check Apple machines. And anything
| with a Windows sticker works with Windows.
|
| Some Linux distro should explicitly support some line of
| laptops. Literally "buy these models because we will 100%
| support them".
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > Some Linux distro should explicitly support some line
| of laptops. Literally "buy these models because we will
| 100% support them".
|
| Like PopOS from System 76?
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| At those prices in Australia, it's not a great option.
| None of those Linux vendors are.
|
| Dell or Lenovo has international presence and if
| something goes wrong with the hardware, support exists.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Actually the previous poster talked about sites for
| laptops supporting hackintoshes. I'd be very surprised if
| you find that information on any "official" website.
| lUZQnvuFJt wrote:
| Does anyone shop for laptops this way? or anything else for
| that matter - Google "laptops that support usb c" and expect
| an official page from usb c? or google "cars that have a
| turbocharger" and expect an official page from turbocharger?
| And, when you don't find it come to a conclusion that usb c
| is bad.
|
| No offense but seems like even if you did find laptops with
| linux and pick the best one, you probably won't like it
| because you have already made up your mind.
| caslon wrote:
| Not to give an argument along the lines of "You're holding it
| wrong," but...okay, yeah, I'm going to do that.
|
| You hold a gun in _one way._ If you mess that up in any
| fashion, you probably won 't hit what you're trying to, and,
| worse, might shoot yourself.
|
| Saying things like "There is no official site" is holding
| Linux wrong. Linux _isn 't_ an operating system. Linux is
| just a kernel.
|
| So phrase your search the _right_ way:
|
| "laptops that support GNU/Linux installation"
|
| You'll be surprised to find, immediately it lists a whole
| bunch of laptops _sold with a Linux kernel on them!_ I don 't
| normally use Google, but just for you, I checked on it: It
| even has an easy-answers page.
|
| If you want the whole package, look up an _operating system,_
| not a kernel.
| freebuju wrote:
| > I don't normally use Google, but just for you, I checked
| on it: It even has an easy-answers page.
|
| It was at this point that this troll immediately turned
| tasteless like chewed up sugarcane.
| caslon wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is perfectly sufficient, but the above poster
| uses Google. So I used Google to demonstrate.
| freebuju wrote:
| Oh my bad. I mistakenly thought use of LMGTFY to be a
| narcissistic troll. Missed the part where searching
| google is part of the experiment.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| With my latest Linux machine I actually picked some easy to
| get laptops on a steep discount and then started googling
| to find other people's experience. I've been using some
| Linux distribution or other for a long time.
|
| But that's not what a newbie or outsider sees. And until
| there is the kind of assurance from some Linux distribution
| or whatever, all criticisms of the difficulty of getting a
| Linux machine running are valid.
| caslon wrote:
| > And until there is the kind of assurance from some
| Linux distribution or whatever, all criticisms of the
| difficulty of getting a Linux machine running are valid.
|
| Great, they're invalid! Off the top of my head, System76
| and KDE both sell laptops running it. As both of them
| have distributions, and selling something is more or less
| as close to assurance as you can get, by your own logic
| here the criticisms are worthless.
|
| I don't even care about "le Linux on the desktop meme",
| personally, I just find these criticisms incredibly lazy
| and transparently without merit.
| pjmlp wrote:
| With Linux to hold a gun, you have first to assemble it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > So I Googled "laptops supported by Linux". There is no
| official site.
|
| https://linux-on-laptops.com/ has been around for a long time
| and it looks like it's still being updated. Though the
| official Linux-Laptop-HOWTO does need a lot of work to make
| it current.
| one2three4 wrote:
| +1 I find it absurd that (some) linux supporters find it not
| only ok but even a must, to have to tinker around your
| machine in order to make everything work. I could understand
| it in the 90s but this is a very different era we're in. I
| get zero value from having to tinker with my x-org settings
| to make the external screen work (sometimes). I'm using a
| computer to create value elsewhere and having to even think
| about stuff that should just work eats up my time and energy.
|
| I believe this is the main reason that OSx and even Windows
| are much more prevalent in company laptops that any linux
| distro. And I don't see this changing anytime soon. If even
| Ubuntu didn't make that cut I don't see which (distro) will.
|
| Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux
| TBH. Maybe there's some light there. Dunno. But my last
| experience with a Thinkpad 550 and latest ubuntu was bad. As
| in no proper keyboard, terrible screen issues, networking
| issues...
| herbst wrote:
| Personally i think it is insane to install OSX or Windows
| for anyone who does not want to tinker these days. Why not
| just a major linux (maybe not ubuntu if you dont like
| tinkering, but fedora or so) so the box works without
| issues for more than a few months
| atleta wrote:
| Depends on what you tinker with. Getting basic things to
| work on your hardware is frustrating. Nobody wants to deal
| with that really. The answer for that is getting a laptop
| (or desktop) that is well supported. I know it can feel
| limiting, but with OSX you only get to choose from one
| vendor...
|
| If we talk about tinkering for customizing your user
| experience then it's _very_ empowering. You can get things
| to work exactly as you 'd like and that _is_ a productivity
| booster. (Even if it just removes frustration and
| friction.) Sometimes it means being able to undo the stupid
| decisions of the developers (e.g. GNOME) which may seem
| like the first category (i.e. you have to tinker just in
| order to get things work _again_ as they used to), but if
| you are stuck on windows or osx you 'd have a lot less
| chance to do so and you'd lot more likely just have to put
| up with it.
|
| E.g. in the past 2+ decades I have to wrestle to get my
| desktop grid layout (3x3 desktops/workspaces) to work,
| because some idiot back around 2000 figured out that it's
| _" not the right metaphor"_ or what not and they should not
| be geometrically related, yadda-yadda. Since then, every
| major upgrade of gnome breaks the external solution I use
| (which is different every time). Is it frustrating? Yes. At
| least I know not to upgrade until I know there is a
| workaround _again_. But I _can_ keep using it nevertheless.
| (I used to have a utility that provided this feature on
| windows. The last version I 've used it on was XP and even
| back then it wasn't available for download anymore. I'm not
| sure at all if I could still use it on win10 or even win7.)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I dunno, not my experience these days.
|
| Our family Lenovo all-in-one windows machine with its
| preinstalled windows: Time synchronization doesn't work.
| Have to set the clock manually. When logging in and if
| another user is logged in the start bar freezes for up to 5
| minutes before it lets me do anything. All sorts of things
| like this. Random problems like that.
|
| My personal Windows machine upstairs loses sound output via
| my monitor every time the monitor goes to sleep and wakes
| up. Windows just forgets that the device exists. Sometimes
| plugging in a headphone and then unplugging it will
| "remind" Windows that there's an HDMI output device, other
| times not.
|
| No issues with Linux on that machine at all. Everything
| just works, stock Debian install. No issues with sound,
| only issue being that the fan is a bit loud so I had to
| fiddle with bios settings to get it quieter.
| matwood wrote:
| > Time synchronization doesn't work.
|
| Windows insists on the source port of NTP to be 123, and
| many ISPs (like ATT) block this port. No idea why MS
| hasn't fixed this issue.
|
| https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-
| US/e16117c3-0...
| joana035 wrote:
| I don't have to mess around with xorg config for more than
| 10 years.
|
| I'm using Debian and the only thing I had to do is enable
| non-free to get some firmwares.
|
| Everything works 100% hassle free.
|
| My experiences with macos were quite frustrating, specially
| around package management (or the lack of it), poor quality
| of brew packages (too many dependencies breaking stuff),
| constant slowdown and crashes with mildly median workload,
| screen artifacts around the desktop time to time, having to
| disable stuff to be able to change things in /usr or /etc,
| too many stuff eating up ram by default, etc.
|
| Honestly don't know how people can use that and be happy.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| > Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux
| TBH
|
| Seriously? Why do you think Linux should work perfectly on
| some random machine that you installed it on? MacOS sure as
| hell won't. If you don't like the experience of doing the
| work to find the right hardware, distro, and customizing
| the setup with your favourite software then just buy a
| prebuilt system with everything installed. Like others have
| pointed out, many Linux users prefer to fully customize
| their setup, doing this is easier on Linux because you
| don't have to hack around all of the default choices that
| Apple or Microsoft provide.
| robsonhn wrote:
| Ok, sure, many users prefer to fully customize their
| setup. But what about those who don't? Why isn't there a
| ready-to-go option like a Windows lapotop?
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I got a System76 Darter Pro for work, preinstalled with
| Ubuntu. It worked perfectly. It booted directly into a
| graphical display manager. All drivers worked out of the
| box. Not sure what else there is to say here. That sounds
| like what you're after.
|
| For reasons, I ended up installing Arch on the same
| laptop. It was your typical Arch experience, but I was
| able to get everything working, including fiddly stuffy
| like keyboard backlights, and monitor backlighting.
| Keyboard hardware controls all function. And this was
| with existing Arch packages. I didn't have to go hacking
| anywhere.
|
| If I had to levy criticism, I'd say the preinstalled
| Linux options are at the same price point as Apple, and
| no where near Microsoft. Yeah, it's going to be harder to
| find an off-the-shelf $300 laptop with Linux
| preinstalled. I can say the same about a Mac too.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| System 76 is not cheap. Worse if you're international.
| Dell has limited options available and none that are
| available with their discounts. So if you want a nice and
| powerful dev machine... back to researching and
| tinkering. Is the cheapest way and if something is messed
| up, you still have the Windows license.
| redshirtrob wrote:
| > System 76 is not cheap.
|
| I acknowledged as much. However, the OP's comparison is
| with a Mac so I don't think discussing the cheapest
| approach is in the scope of the discussion.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| There are ready to go options! System76 sells Linux
| computers, there's a few other companies that do too.
| Dell has stuff like their XPS Developer Editions that are
| designed for and come with Ubuntu out of the box. You
| just can't hop over to Best Buy and get a random system.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah, buy a linux certified laptop and you're done. You
| want the ability to hop hardware without paying the price
| that you might have to configure the OS to suit your
| workflow/hardware. Even the king of multiplatform PCs
| windows 10 you will sometimes experience issues until you
| install the right drivers.
| lUZQnvuFJt wrote:
| There are many, obviously not as many as ones that offer
| Windows. In my previous workplace I had the option to
| choose any laptop and I chose one that comes with ubuntu
| preinstalled from the Dell XPS family. The reason I was
| comfortable with buying this for work, it comes
| preinstalled and I wouldn't have to tinker but I could
| call support. Didn't ever have to in the past few year.
| There are a bunch of Lenovo thinkpads and thinkstations
| that come preinstalled with ubuntu. Not to forget
| multiple companies such as System76, Pursim etc.
|
| There are options if you really want them. Whether you
| like to use one is up to one's personal preference.
| Though, it doesn't help that way too many people who
| haven't used a linux laptop in recent times have strong
| opinions about them, as evident in this thread.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Linux has some great new development, like Wayland[1],
| pipewire. They may be a bit buggy as of now, but the former
| does basically solve the tinkering with x config things,
| multi monitor hdpi, hotplugged monitor and the like will
| just work.
|
| [1] Yeah wayland is a protocol, and it already has some
| quite stable implementations like gnome and sway.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| I find insane that people need to tinker with anything. My
| fedora lenovo just works. Lol.
| petepete wrote:
| Mine too. Even the fingerprint reader.
|
| No tinkering required, the only change required to make
| it useable was to set desktop scaling for HiDPI,
| accessible via Displays area if the settings app. No
| terminal commands required.
| one2three4 wrote:
| Thinks were a little better with previous ubuntu TBH.
| After upgrading to latest LTS I got the screen issues on
| top of everything else.
|
| Think twice before upgrading your distro.
| addicted wrote:
| Ubuntu has been going down the drain for a long time.
|
| The problem is that they successfully (and for good
| reason) became the de facto Desktop Linux for users who
| wanted a desktop and not mess with it much.
|
| They've cornered that market to the point there are very
| few alternatives (at least very few that will come
| preinstalled and supported) but because they want to IPO
| I guess, they've stopped focusing on the desktop at all
| and instead are concentrating on server uses primarily,
| which leads to significant issues.
| herbst wrote:
| The irony is by becoming the "it just works" monster
| ubuntu tries to be right now it brought issues that no
| other major linux faces.
|
| For me (using linux for 15+ years as desktop) ubuntu
| tends to break after only a few months. Usually complex
| dependencies like steam, wine or video editing stuff
| break first. I rarely manage to get out of a update
| without some dependencies breaking...
|
| Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, ... nothing like that. Just a
| major stable operating system
|
| Edit:// to clearify. I do like and use ubuntu server
| because its simple and well supported. I just think its
| mediocre as desktop OS and would recommend anyone to
| check Manjaro or Fedora
| edgyquant wrote:
| I vastly prefer Fedora but could never get tensorflow to
| work with my GPU (Nvidia 1660x,) and unfortunately now I
| can't get it to work with Ubuntu either. Or, more
| accurately, I can't get it to work while using display
| drivers. I have to install one or the other.
| toyg wrote:
| _> but because they want to IPO I guess, they've stopped
| focusing on the desktop at all_
|
| No, that's simply because the desktop, after all these
| years, still brings in little or no money - whereas
| server builds are used in clouds (at one point they were
| the most popular "cloud distro") and do make significant
| money through revenue-sharing agreements.
|
| Ubuntu desktop started going downhill the minute
| Shuttleworth decided he'd had enough with the "generous
| mecenate" thing and Ubuntu should make back its costs.
| Since then, it's been a series of steers towards anything
| that could make some cash.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| So does Ubuntu. I've installed it on a few family's
| computers without any issues as long as the hardware
| wasn't brand spanking new. The defaults are fine and it
| makes a good secure machine for the (younger) kids to use
| the internet on for those families who limit their kids
| time on the internet.
| foldr wrote:
| If anything, the amount of tinkering required has increased
| as hardware has gotten more complex. I'm probably looking
| through rose-tinted glasses to some extent, but in the mid
| 2000s it was usually quite easy to get graphics and sound
| working well in Linux on generic PC hardware. And of
| course, most people didn't need to worry about WiFi,
| Bluetooth, suspend/resume, touchpads, etc. etc. in those
| days.
| atleta wrote:
| I constantly had problems with these and more back then.
| (E.g. making my TV grabbing card work was a nightmare.) I
| don't experience this since I've been using a ThinkPad.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Dell sells a fully supported laptop.
|
| System76.
|
| Librem. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| https://laptopwithlinux.com/
|
| I run a recent XPS Developer Edition (my second) and I've
| had so few issues over years. It's always seemed like a
| different world all users with constant issues.
|
| Would absolutey recommend Elementary OS for Mac users
| switching to Linux. I moved to Arch a couple of weeks ago,
| but only because of combination of wanting to try Gnome 40
| and wanting to run various cutting edge mobile Linux deps.
|
| No problems with Arch either so far.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Even when bought with support, it might come with surprises.
|
| I got the Asus 1215B with Linux, then Ubuntu decided to
| replace the perfectly working wlan driver with a FOSS one,
| except it took half an year to reach parity with the
| proprietary one.
|
| Likewise, they decided to replace AMD driver with the open
| source one, goodbye OpenGL 4.1 now it doesn't do more than
| OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video decoding is still not a thing.
|
| At the same time, the Windows DX 11 drivers shipped with the
| same hardware (it was Windows 7 back then), still work on
| Windows 10.
|
| This kind of settled Linux on desktop for me, now it belongs
| to VMs, and on ChromeOS/WebOS/Android it is anyway just an
| implementation detail.
| beckman466 wrote:
| I get your frustrations, yet your problem is with
| proprietary software and proprietary drivers. I'm sure
| there's a way for you to go back to using the old drivers
| if you're set on using the latest capabilities of your
| hardware (without it being FOSS).
|
| You don't have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if
| it's not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it,
| and see it as a challenge).
| gknoy wrote:
| That sounds a little like telling someone that their
| problems are that their cows are not spherical. For
| graphics drivers specifically, having tochoose between
| FOSS and something that works is very frustrating.
| dmm wrote:
| The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for
| years.
| notyourday wrote:
| > The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for
| years.
|
| Intel has a random lock up in the Mesa. It had this lock
| up for several years. It has not been fixed. I have a 4k
| laptop with it, it is incredibly frustrating that I
| cannot use kitty or alacritty on it because of that
| crash.
|
| AMD driver crashes on modern cards every few weeks.
|
| If you want to have a "What are you talking about, it
| just works?" experience, you buy an NVidia card with
| proprietary drivers, slap X11 on it and you are off to
| the races. It just works (currently driving 4x 4k
| monitors). Last crash was about 11 months ago. The crash
| manifested in a freeze for about 20 seconds, followed by
| it recovering by itself.
|
| OSS graphics drivers are just not as good as people
| claim.
| mcny wrote:
| I would have agreed with you but sound input broke for me
| (Lenovo flex 14 with AMD R5 3500U) on fedora with kernel
| 5.8 and didn't get fixed until 5.9. That was months of
| something being broken. How did this happen and more
| importantly did we learn anything to prevent this from
| happening in the future?
|
| For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an
| ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Some Intel GPUs only got Vulkan support on Windows.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Fortunately with AMD GPUs on linux you get both, as the
| proprietary driver simply adds some opencl support if my
| memory serves well.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nope, older GPUs just get basic support, while the older
| proprietary driver, more feature rich, don't work in
| modern kernels.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately it is not backported for older GPUs.
| But it doesn't make the case of supported hardwares
| worse.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It does, because the hardware support for OpenGL 4.1 got
| broken due to ideology.
| joana035 wrote:
| Well, it is still open after all, given you are a very
| experienced guy you should consider rolling the sleeves
| and sending some patches to fix that, right?
|
| Giving back to the community for something you get for
| _free_ is nice.
| pjmlp wrote:
| My gratis work is done for things that really matter to
| fellow humans, like charity, poor people on the street
| and not so lucky people that need an helping hand to get
| back into society, refugees that almost faced death
| running away from oppressive regimes.
|
| That is where I can gladly give my skills and money.
|
| Fixing code on Internet for free ain't it.
| joana035 wrote:
| Look buddy, your experience (having a bad time) with
| Linux seems to be quite frustrating, I couldn't find one
| positive comment about Linux from you in this post.
|
| Maybe I'm very lucky with Linux, but I don't agree that
| it is as bad as you are saying.
|
| I'm sorry for you, maybe you should stay with windows
| indeed. :/
| pjmlp wrote:
| My dear, maybe you should stop assuming you know anything
| about the experience of others.
| joana035 wrote:
| Experience as in "things you are facing" not as
| "knowledge" or "know how" ;)
|
| What I mean is more like "I would have a bad experience
| if I put my hand in the fire".
|
| I edit my post to be more clear
| pjmlp wrote:
| I get it, you are happy with your Linux experience and
| think you know better than someone with 30 years UNIX
| experience, no more to discuss.
| joana035 wrote:
| I don't, I just think that too much experience can cloud
| our vision or close ourselves from having better/new
| experiences in life.
|
| From your friend over the wire.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There is no way, because the only way to make it work is
| to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus
| released 1215B with Linux support.
|
| Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working
| just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally
| released with Windows 7.
|
| So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows
| 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the
| original Windows 7 drivers for Asus 1215B.
|
| I have been a Linux guinea pig since Slackware 2.0 came
| on Linux Unleashed book, eventually one gets tired of the
| Linux Desktop meme.
|
| Linux was anyway just the way I got cheap UNIX clone at
| home during my degree, professionally I have spent more
| years using commercial UNIXes.
|
| Nowadays any POSIX clone will do the job, or as
| alternative we stuck the Linux kernel into a VM.
| joana035 wrote:
| Have you tried to install AMD proprietary drivers?
|
| Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?
|
| By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really
| don't like it and that nobody can convince you te
| opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the
| basics around it it pay off in the long run :)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Missed this remark?
|
| > There is no way, because the only way to make it work
| is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year
| Asus released 1215B with Linux support.
|
| My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in
| 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris,
| Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD,
| Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux.
|
| Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulation software
| while at CERN running on Linux, followed by other
| examples of deployment of Linux based software into
| production, like Nokia's NetAct cluster monitoring
| platform.
|
| I think I can manage with the basics.
| joana035 wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't though that would offend you.
|
| I just think that those issues are relatively easy to fix
| and that you can still have the proprietary gpu modules
| to get OpenGL 4.1 back.
|
| For the wifi to work well with the open module you could
| have installed the firmwares.
|
| That's what I mean by basics, I didn't meant to put down
| your credentials :)
|
| Sorry again for my poor writing
| pjmlp wrote:
| None taken, and it is easier just to re-install Windows
| with the proprietary drivers than hacking a modern kernel
| to run fxglr.
|
| https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD
| joana035 wrote:
| I don't think judging the Linux experience based on an
| EeePC is fair.
|
| That hardware always felt like a throw away when it came
| out during the netbook boom from a decade ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I judge my Linux experience starting in Summer 1995, the
| year I got my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0,
| that makes a couple of years in experience.
| joana035 wrote:
| I wish you can give another try, much has changed since
| then.
|
| For me Debian Testing with Gnome is being a very nice
| experience (enjoyable ride).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Again don't assume you know anything about me, I have
| enough Linux appliances and the office has enough
| distributions to try out.
| joana035 wrote:
| I'm not assuming, and that is ok.
|
| Try to not see everything as an attack against your
| identity, detach yourself from it and don't take yourself
| too seriously. Been there, done that.
|
| Now I have a way more pleasant life experience and people
| takes me seriously without having me needing to assert
| who I am. Life is lighter now and I have more friends,
| people few more comfortable around me.
|
| I'm giving this feedback because I think it will make
| your life better too.
|
| Was nice to chat with you, now I'll go out for a bike
| ride while I still a bit of sun over here.
|
| Happy Easter!
| beckman466 wrote:
| Ah okay, thanks - then my take was a bad take.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I still remember when I bought a laptop _officially preloaded_
| with Ubuntu.
|
| And the minute I did software update there, everything broke.
| (Because it was using some binary graphic driver that broke
| with newer kernel.)
|
| I could not even use the computer after that, only the console.
| I needed to reinstall old ubuntu in order to get my data.
|
| Never again
| freebuju wrote:
| Blame the vendor who shipped you proprietary graphics
| drivers.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I half blame them, but also Linux that explicitly doesn't
| care about binary compatibility of graphic drivers, unlike
| Windows.
| rovr138 wrote:
| So now it's not finding and using an officially supported
| laptop running Linux, but using a officially supported that
| runs Linux and doesn't break.
|
| Well, if that's the argument, I want to see this device
| that's guaranteed to not break.
| wander_homer wrote:
| When I bought my Thinkpad (one year after its release and with
| lots of recommendations) it took more than a year before it
| worked reliably without any kernel panics and weird lockups.
| External monitor support when docked was broken for even
| longer. Now I fear the day this notebook stops working and I
| might have to go through similar trouble again.
| [deleted]
| galkk wrote:
| I own Thinkpad X1 extreme, that I bought with my own money, and
| chose as working laptop Thinkpad Carbon. Both are not working
| well with linux.
|
| 1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K
| external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.
|
| 2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after
| every reboot.
|
| 3. The screen tearing sucks.
|
| 4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all
| the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card
| after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.
|
| On my own laptop, where I installed Ubuntu, I can boot only
| into 5.8.0.43 kernel (the one which I initially installed). All
| others, that I've got via apt-get update stuck with blinking
| cursor at last step of boot, and it's well known problem.
|
| The longer I'm trying to love linux for work os, the more I
| realize that only tool that I truly want from linux is i3. For
| the rest I'm happily using WSL2 on my home, and don't have
| choice with work.
|
| So on next hardware refresh date I think I'll choose Mac. The
| supplied by job laptop config is also more performant than
| carbon. So, hope, I'll be able to use my monitors in native
| res, and not put 2K into 1920x1020 mode
| antod wrote:
| I was having huge flaky thunderbolt problems on my Linux T490
| - even updating the laptop firmware didn't fix it despite
| Lenovo changelogs indicating a bunch of thunderbolt dock bugs
| fixed.
|
| Then I swapped the Lenovo thunderbolt dock with another one
| at work and everything just worked fine. I run 3 monitors (2
| external 2560x1440) at once, but no 4k.
|
| Maybe it was dock firmware versions - the Lenovo dock updater
| software was Windows only, so I had never tried it.
| galkk wrote:
| sudo fwupdmgr update
|
| was finding updates for thunderbolt dock on linux
| shaan7 wrote:
| > 2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock)
| after every reboot.
|
| If you're still facing this, there is UI for remembering the
| authorization https://christian.kellner.me/2018/04/23/the-
| state-of-thunder...
|
| I'm on a AMD device right now so I can't test it myself, just
| sharing the link in case its useful :)
| robert_foss wrote:
| > 3. The screen tearing sucks.
|
| Use Wayland instead of X11.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I was trying to make the Mac to Linux switch just like the
| author, mostly due to excitement around sway (wayland). But
| it was awful, none of the basic things I wanted to do
| seemed doable...I would research solutions and they
| wouldn't work. So I tried switching to i3 in the hopes of
| at least having a more established ecosystem to rely on.
|
| But similar story. Half-baked (or sometimes, overcooked)
| support, configs that we're supposed to swap eg CapsLock
| with Escape not working as described or losing their effect
| after sleep, impossible to get my multi monitor high DPI
| setup to work without coloration or resolution issues,
| futzing around with sound and not able to get it working as
| hoped just like the last time I tried to do this in
| 2008...you know, all the things you want before you start
| doing actual work, but none of them function properly OOTB
| or, often, even after reading extensive documentation and
| advice.
|
| I wish I could use i3, but my BetterTouchTool configuration
| gives me something that is close enough.
|
| I might still try FreeBSD, but I totally feel twice-burned
| by Linux at this point.
| matwood wrote:
| > I was trying to make the Mac to Linux switch just like
| the author
|
| I've tried a couple of times, but finally decided what's
| the point. Linux is amazing on all the servers I run and
| manage. It's lightweight, supported well, and does a
| great job. I also rarely have to tinker with it. For
| servers, it really does just work.
|
| On the PC side not so much. I used to run linux in
| various flavors on the desktop side for years. It
| provided more power than windows IMO. Then OS X came out
| with actual unix underpinnings, a functional media system
| (UI, audio, video), and fully supported creative apps
| like Ps, MS Office, and later LR.
|
| Against my better judgement I tried a final time move to
| desktop linux a couple of years ago, but multi-monitor
| mixes of hi and low dpi were just unworkable. I actually
| posted a question (it may have been here on HN - can't
| remember), and one of the responses was 'no one needs
| HiDPI screens'. Got it.
| hansel_der wrote:
| > can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt
| adapter.
|
| VGA ftw
|
| > screen tearing sucks
|
| it sure does. look into your os config for a compositor or
| drop the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-intel.conf :
| Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics"
| Driver "intel" Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
| Option "TearFree" "true" EndSection
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Why does it have a 'tearfree' 'false' option?
| bicolao wrote:
| From the man page
|
| > Thus enabling TearFree requires more memory and is
| slower (reduced throughput) and introduces a small amount
| of output latency, but it should not impact input latency
| minimaul wrote:
| However, TearFree does murder performance and lead to some
| horrible screen lag at times, and as an extra bonus
| AccelMethod sna is still crashy years after being
| introduced :(
|
| edit: there's also the modesetting driver + a reasonable
| compositor, but this can come with it's own set of bugs and
| issues in my experience.
| the_local_host wrote:
| I've been interested in recording music using free
| software on Linux. The exchange above is similar to the
| cycle I've been in... encountering problems, finding
| magical incantations that fix things in some ways but
| often involve some sort of tradeoff, and making gradual
| progress toward being as productive as I am using Apple's
| Logic.
|
| But I've been doing this three steps forward, two steps
| back routine for like three years now. I have most things
| working but it has really taken the full force of my
| frustration with Apple to keep returning to it and making
| progress.
| minimaul wrote:
| It's exactly why I have mac laptops for work and personal
| use, although I also have a full time linux desktop (and
| also a windows one for gaming. still no real alternative
| there!).
|
| I'm an easily frustrated person and I end up with enough
| pain points on linux for both work and personal use that
| I've never managed to make the switch full time.
| one2three4 wrote:
| Curious. If you had to buy tomorrow, what would you do? Given
| that M1 Pro won't be out till end of 21(?) and despite that,
| current Pros don't seem to come with a reduced price.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I have a 13" M1 pro, it's easily the best computer I've
| owned (and I have a Ryzen 3600/Vega 10 desktop with 128GB
| of RAM that runs KDE Plasma very well, but there's still no
| competition)
| LIV2 wrote:
| > 1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K
| external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.
|
| Is this a Linux only issue? I saw people reporting on Reddit
| that they are using 4k @ 60hz external monitors. Was thinking
| of getting an X1C but not if it can't do 4k
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if it was a thunderbolt linux
| issue. The dell "docking station" usb-c hubs don't really
| work well with anything else than dell windows machines.
| Same with some lenovo bluetooth mice.
|
| I do remember however that contrary to macos my 2012
| macbook air could drive higher resolution external monitors
| when running linux. So I'd put this into the Thunderbolt is
| a hackjob on linux box.
| krzyk wrote:
| I think this might be issue with given laptop.
|
| Some non-apple laptops sometimes reduce badwidth of
| thunderbold 3 (e.g. in mine t490s the bandwidth is
| halved, just because - this is hardware, not linux).
| benibela wrote:
| >4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened
| all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound
| card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it
| off/on.
|
| Sounds is really bad
|
| To get sound on my headphones, I need to restart pulseaudio
| and ALSA, and unplug and replug the headphones
| jonahbenton wrote:
| This piece is mostly evidence that it is hard to switch platforms
| and expect to preserve one's workflow. Doesn't work. Have to
| adopt to the native ergonomics.
|
| In that context, Linux is often best looked as a Chromebook Pro.
| Great when you can do most of your work in or around a browser,
| plus or minus the shell.
|
| And among Linuxes, Fedora crushes. Cheers.
| kruxigt wrote:
| Sadly, Dell XPS 13 is not even close to a Macbook in quality.
| Dell is a company that is notorious for cutting corners when it
| comes to their hardware. I recently tried an XPS 13 to see if
| things had improved. It had: broken sound, coil whine, horrible
| trackpad.
| preommr wrote:
| What a topsy-turvy article.
|
| Mail is fine if you use browser-based solutions. Nobody is
| talking about only sending plaintext emails? Wtf?
|
| Why are they running so much stuff on wine?
|
| Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
|
| How does anyone think nautilus is good?
|
| How does anyone think that Gimp/inkscape are better than affinity
| designer?
|
| These are the things they find useful about linux? There's so
| much more that makes linux a powerful solution (e.g. great window
| managers like i3), or much better support for shell based
| workflows.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
|
| This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch.
| Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux
| for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing
| regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in
| proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's.
|
| > How does anyone think nautilus is good?
|
| I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest
| file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Fedora also does kernel updates within a stable release, and
| some proprietary hardware works best with it while being
| mildly broken on Debian-derived distros so I might even
| recommend it to some first-time users.
| astrognomy wrote:
| > How does anyone think nautilus is good?
|
| I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows
| File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose
| Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support
| for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I
| double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has
| an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone
| through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I
| feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion
| using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments
| against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers
| who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to
| make the application maintainable.
| konart wrote:
| >Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
|
| I'm pretty sure I had like 4 kernel upgrades on my Fedora
| machine in the last month.
|
| >great window managers like i3
|
| Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you
| are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty
| useless.
|
| I don't have non-maximized windows for example (except for
| Telegram, Obsidian and iTerm quake-like instance)
| peferron wrote:
| > Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless
| you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are
| pretty useless.
|
| If you only use the terminal, you don't need a tiling WM
| because tmux and others offer similar functionality out of
| the box.
|
| Tiling WMs are useful in the opposite scenario, when you use
| many different apps and need a unified way to manage them
| all.
| konart wrote:
| Valid point, I stand corrected.
|
| I just can't imagine working in an environment where you
| have, say, 4 apps occupying 4 parts of your screen
| continuously.
|
| Splitting screen in two (terminal and browser) is the
| common scenario for me but you don't need i3 for this.
| peferron wrote:
| I agree that you don't need i3 for the common scenario
| (IDE + terminal in my case). i3 is more about the myriad
| of uncommon scenarios that come up all the time.
|
| For example, maybe I want to keep an eye on several
| terminal commands at the same time. With i3 I just press
| the terminal shortcut n times and I have n new terminal
| windows sharing the space. If one of the commands fails
| with a long error message I press another shortcut and
| the terminal windows are now tabbed and full height, with
| the IDE still visible on the side.
|
| Or maybe I want a small browser window or Slack window in
| a corner to keep an eye on a meeting or discussion while
| I work.
|
| Whatever uncommon layout best serves my needs right now,
| i3 can get it done in seconds.
|
| You never really _need_ a tiling WM, though. i3 just
| solves my problems really well, so well in fact that I
| actively enjoy using it. Some people feel the same way
| about vim, and you never really need vim either.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Maybe how you use Linux is different from how the authors uses
| Linux? Maybe their relation to their computer is different from
| yours? Maybe Linux serves some use cases well, and not others?
| symlinkk wrote:
| What's wrong with nautilus?
| christophilus wrote:
| What file browser do you use? I'm currently on Nautilus, and am
| not a fan.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Eh. I've ended up with the opposite conclusion, at least for my
| purposes. Running Word is neat, but having to spend half a day
| figuring out what Apple did to C++ headers after an Xcode update
| so R will compile packages again is not fun. Unfortunately I
| can't really install Linux on the damn thing because of the
| hardware.
|
| Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with
| conversation view...
| shaan7 wrote:
| Oh and one day Xcode will suddenly stop updating. Why? Because
| I lost my credit card yesterday and blocked it, so now App
| Store will not update a free app. Whaa?
| flobosg wrote:
| Seconding the Mailspring recommendation, but be aware that it
| requires a Mailspring ID. There's some progress, though, with a
| telemetry-free fork[1] (that's the version I'm using right now)
| and plans to make the ID optional in the official client [2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre
|
| [2]: https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-
| mai...
| lytefm wrote:
| I agree. The author makes it clear that using "business" tools
| like MSOffice and writing a lot of nicely formatted emails is
| important to him. Wouldn't have switched to Linux if that was
| the case for me. I'm writing < 10 emails per day - Evolution +
| WebDav/CardDav is good enough for me.
|
| I'm also on a 2018 Xps with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything just
| works.
|
| To me, the clear advantage is how installing all kind of
| obscure R/Python packages is usually a smooth experience,
| whereas a working Mac version frequently doesn't even exist or
| requires struggling with obscure errors, especially after MacOs
| upgrades (e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186
| 923309662953...)
| burlesona wrote:
| Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with
| "quick look" as a contender for most under-appreciated feature.
|
| Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability
| to open in preview and read or even markup and make small
| changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really
| miss those two features.
| boogies wrote:
| > Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time
|
| I've lost count of the times I've seen macOS users saying they
| can't leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have
| listed any features not present in both GNOME's Evince and
| KDE's Okular (not that I've ever needed or used any of the
| three).
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| How are those for editing PDFs? I haven't tried those
| specific tools, but in the past when I tried it was
| surprisingly difficult to figure out how to do things like
| merge 2 PDFs or rearrange the pages on non-Macs
| mceachen wrote:
| Editing PDFs and sticking your signature on documents is
| trivial with Preview.app. Save-as-PDF is broken (edits don't
| show up reliably), but you can easily just print to PDF to
| work around that bug.
|
| I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great
| if either worked, but I haven't looked into it.
|
| (FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test
| PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes are on my
| desk too. PDF-related tasks are the only other reason why I
| turn to my Mac.)
| Vinnl wrote:
| Hmm, I installed a quick look equivalent on my desktop because
| I saw that mentioned as being so useful a lot, but I keep
| forgetting I have it. In what situations would you use it?
| crubier wrote:
| You just prove the point of the author above.
|
| If you had the real Preview on MacOS, you'd be using it all
| the time without even thinking, like 100% of MacOS users.
| Because it's fast, it opens everything faster than you can
| think, and it just works well. The effort required to launch
| it is zero, or even negative. It's just part of the OS.
|
| But since you have a << sort of >> copy cat which does not
| work as well or as fast, is not as well integrated, does not
| support as many files or any fatal flaw like that, you just
| don't use it.
|
| So yes, Preview is underrated and really hard to replicate.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I wasn't talking about Preview, I was talking about quick
| look, i.e. when I browse files in my file browser, I can
| hit space and immediately look at that file in a pared-down
| interface. But I'm not browsing my files that often, and
| when I do, the only time I seem to be interested in what it
| looks like is when I'm looking for an image, in which case
| the thumbnails that I can see without interaction suffice.
|
| So I'm probably missing something. Does that mean that,
| because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a
| complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise?
| And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it
| also work for editing? And what kind of files?
|
| Note that I'm not out to prove any point, I just want to
| understand what I'm missing :)
| latexr wrote:
| > Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-
| effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native
| app you'd use otherwise?
|
| In my case, yes. It's the only way I ever look at images,
| and I often use it to have a quick look at scripts or
| text/data files (try it on a CSV and it'll show as a
| table!). It's also convenient for design files, whose
| apps are incredibly slow to launch. With Alfred[1] you
| can even preview URLs directly.
|
| Finally, QuickLook shines when you have file formats for
| which you don't have an editor (e.g. you may need to view
| a Photoshop or Word document once in a while). It allows
| you to view them faster than in the editing application,
| for free, without having to install or configure
| anything.
|
| Unlike the swath of people who are singing praises to
| Preview, I rarely touch it and mostly resort to
| QuickLook, even for PDFs.
|
| > And then just for files you're just consuming, or does
| it also work for editing?
|
| It works (at least) to edit images like Preview
| (annotate, rotate, crop).
|
| [1]: https://www.alfredapp.com
| Vinnl wrote:
| Thanks, I suppose I should make an effort to think of it
| when I look at local images or PDFs (which I don't do
| that often) - although edit doesn't seem to be supported
| by my version of it, unfortunately. CSVs or files without
| an editor I don't think I ever touch :)
| sooheon wrote:
| quick look spreadsheets when you don't want to wait half
| a minute for excel to load. Quick look pdfs with
| nondescript names that you've downloaded to check paper
| titles/authors, quick look ppts youve been emailed (from
| within the email app) to see if they're worth reading in
| depth.
| syspec wrote:
| It's faster, and less jarring when it opens due to
| animating FROM the file). It also works in Open / Save
| dialogue windows in any app which the equivalent does
| not.
|
| That little "wait is this the file I want to open /
| overwrite?" When saving a file, it adds to an overall
| feeling of polish.
|
| Like a tasty meal, it's all in the details and how they
| add up
| Rainymood wrote:
| Wait what? You can make small changes in preview?!
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, you can annotate, add text etc
|
| Best feature: you can remove pages from a PDF. Just drag them
| off the left side pane
| terhechte wrote:
| You can also add pages to a PDF, just drag and drop an
| image from Finder into the sidebar and boom, you added to
| the PDF
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| To this day I have still never found any application on any
| device that is as simple and easy to add an arrow and some
| red text to an image for highlighting something as it is with
| preview. It is just unbelievable how janky and bad every
| single other application is at doing this simple task. Not
| even on phones is there anything easy.
| londons_explore wrote:
| WhatsApp.
|
| It combines the adding of the arrow with the process of
| sending it to someone.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Ahh interesting point. Somebody needs to make their next
| 20% project a gmail labs extension that gives a simple
| annotate option to images in mail. It would probably be a
| sleeper hit that gets more use than 90% of other gmail
| features.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Preview works better than anything I've found for adding or
| deleting pages to a PDF, and using the camera to input your
| signature is such a nice feature.
| calabroa wrote:
| Agreed. Updating PDFs is so painful everywhere else but just
| works in preview.
| symlinkk wrote:
| GNOME has this feature
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| It does and it mostly works but it doesn't seem to be as fast
| as on macOS.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Not sure how GNOME's preview feature is written, but macOS
| QuickLook plugins are written in C, C++, or Objective-C and
| the plugins included with the OS leverage OpenCL (or maybe
| Metal now) to accelerate rendering of previews, which is
| part of why it's so fast.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| <SecurityHat> > plugins written in C, C++, ...
|
| no, thank you </SecurityHat>
| tenken wrote:
| Sure, until you mention Finder is browsing an SMB share
| folder ...
|
| Once upon a time I used a Macbook, never again :D
| symlinkk wrote:
| Knew I would get this type of response. The goalposts keep
| shifting
| crubier wrote:
| No. It's just that performance and UX is capital for this
| software, and generally terrible on Linux as compared to
| MacOS
| pm215 wrote:
| I wish preview had the option to _disable_ editing, I find its
| ability to make small changes a misfeature. I use it to read
| big spec documents, and it wants to change them all the time --
| I think accidentally clicking on tables is the usual trigger. I
| resorted to making all my pdf files read-only, but Preview is
| the only pdf viewer that 's ever forced me to do that...
| jug wrote:
| QuickLook on Windows Store is actually pretty good. Same usage
| with spacebar. https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/p/quicklook/9nv4bs3l1h4s?act...
| riedel wrote:
| Great find. It is actual FOSS [1][2]
|
| [1] https://pooi.moe/QuickLook/ [2] https://github.com/QL-
| Win/QuickLook
| wruza wrote:
| Used it for a while, but it really annoys with random
| "let's get updates in chinese" popup from time to time.
| This is _that_ last mile that non-macs always get wrong,
| gosh.
|
| Edit: to add some value to the rant, there is also MiniBin,
| which sits in a tray area and allows you to open/purge your
| recycle bin without reaching a desktop icon.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The ability to extend QuickLook to support more types is huge
| too. If it can be rendered to a static image or HTML page it
| can have a QuickLook plugin written for it.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Did not know this
| addicted wrote:
| QuickLook is great. And the plugins are fantastic. I remember
| when I used to have a Mac there was a QL a plug-in that
| allowed you to peek into and browse Zip/Rar/DMG files.
|
| That was so useful at a time where my workflow included
| multiple zip files containing assignments etc. Being able to
| simply hit spacebar to look into them, instead of
| decompressing and creating a new folder was incredible.
|
| And if I'm not mistaken, the same plugin also allowed
| spotlight to then search the contents of the zip files.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > The grass is not greener on the other side.
|
| Sure it is, just not ALL of it. Everything's a tradeoff; I like
| my work Mac, but I'd never buy one, and not just the absurd Apple
| Tax reason. For my use cases, BY AND LARGE Linux works better,
| for me, but the Mac has some really neat features I miss in
| Linux.
| JediPig wrote:
| the apple m1... is the only laptop anyone should be purchasing
| until the AMD 5900 HS is available to everyone.
|
| I can't stress this enough, the $1400 laptop fully loaded MBA,
| completely smokes the competition, including the $2800 windows.
|
| Until windows catches up with Unified Memory Arch, the m1 is the
| only logical choice.
| theelous3 wrote:
| > I feel like I need to clarify that this is an article aimed at
| Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a
| more polished system
|
| I... don't really know what to say here. Seems like a fundamental
| misunderstanding. On a mac, polished is pre-polished - polished
| from the box to a nice one shape fits all sphere.
|
| For linux, you machine it out of stock to your personal
| dimensions, and hand polish to the finish of your choice.
|
| Comparing the two misses the point of both.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| I use a macbook for 10 years and switched to Linux 2 years ago.
| its great, things have come a long way. I've run Linux desktop on
| asus zenbook, dell xps, and lenovo slim 7.
|
| My work gave me a macbook and i don't like it.
| draw_down wrote:
| Yes, the whole problem is that Mac still doesn't have serious
| competition, at least in certain areas I care about like the
| trackpad. So when they start shitting up their hardware there's
| nowhere to go.
|
| All you can do is wait for Apple to hopefully recognize their
| mistakes, and in the meantime, read blogposts that are like "well
| the trackpad support sucks, but... <lots of prevarication>"
| AmanA wrote:
| The biggest problem with Linux for me was different keyboard
| inputs. CJK, English and, for example, Cyrillic input don't work
| together out of the box. Don't tell me "you should install this
| and that". It's basic functionality that every desktop OS should
| have. Linux desktop sucks.
| eertami wrote:
| I disagree. The hardware and build quality of the XPS13 is
| notably better than my MBP, except for better CPU performance
| which I do not notice at all in daily usage (I know all ultrabook
| keyboards are terrible but the MBP is an a whole other level of
| awful.)
|
| Linux on the XPS has surprised me. I hadn't used desktop Linux
| for ~6 years, but I remember lots of tinkering to get what I
| wanted. Now... If I had to describe it in one word it would be
| "boring". Boring because it just works. Honestly, I have spent
| significantly more time fixing problems in OSX behaviour than I
| do fixing problems on Linux. Even just weird things like Terminal
| text rendering breaking after an OS update which I've never seen
| on Linux.
|
| Admittedly I have never used the default Mail/Calendar apps on
| either OS. I appreciate I'm biased because I know how to use
| Linux fairly well, in spite of a 6 year hiatus. The writer can of
| course hold his own opinion, but I take it with a large grain of
| salt. It's also disingenuous to present his own problems as
| reasons not to use something. It's fine to have a preference but
| I don't see why he needs to try and influence other people's
| decisions.
| brabel wrote:
| > The hardware and build quality of the XPS13 is notably better
| than my MBP
|
| Strongly disagree... the trackpad is much worse on XPS13, and
| the power plug is a joke. Mine broke, I took it to a technician
| to fix and he said it's very common to break that on XPS13's,
| just have a look at the stupid plug they use... after that, the
| plug didn't quite fit anymore and when I tried to make it fit
| better, the metal base for the plug broke completely (and I was
| being really careful!). Now I have a plug hanging outside and
| the only way to fix it is to buy a new frame (which I haven't
| been able to so far).
|
| Bought a MacBook Air to replace it and couldn't be happier with
| my choice... it's a bit slower but so much quieter, better
| hardware in every way, and MacOS is actually very polished
| compared to Ubuntu and KDE.
| eertami wrote:
| > MacOS is actually very polished
|
| Anecdotal I know, but my experience differs. I'm fixing
| problems more frequently on OSX than Linux. I started using
| OSX in 2015 and honestly I now consciously fear the "System
| update available" notifications.
|
| I can't speak to your plug issues, as both the Macbook and
| XPS (2021) I have are USB-C and appear to function
| identically. Sounds annoying though for sure. I don't notice
| any difference in the trackpads, but admittedly I use them
| infrequently.
|
| Sorry to hear about the QC issues. I suppose my opinion will
| sour if I run into them later down the line, but for now it's
| certainly the preferred option. Slightly smaller and lighter
| with a better (but still terrible) keyboard, and feels much
| more comfortable for my palms vs the MBP. And native Linux is
| very well supported so I don't need to deal with Docker for
| Mac or virtual machines to do day to day development work.
| Klonoar wrote:
| You have to be doing something out there if text rendering in
| Terminal of all things breaks after an update.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| No matter who reports breakage ever, on whichever machine, on
| whichever OS - this is always the answer.
|
| "If it doesn't work for you, you are doing something weird."
|
| It's both true and false - it's true, I've progressively gone
| more vanilla in my desktop Linux setup, because the more
| boring and closer to the original developers intention you
| run it, the less hassle and issues you have.
|
| Its false because -everyone- is doing something weird, and
| nothing should break ever.
|
| Breakage will always occur more often in the edge cases then
| mainstream use. Its still bad tough.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I have an XPS 9370 and it feels rickety and poorly made. It
| can't be opened without holding it with both hands. The screen
| gets smears on it from getting in contact with the keyboard.
| The bezels scratch very easily. The light from the LED in the
| power button bleeds out from the edges. The charging brick
| makes a high pitched whine when being used.
|
| I use a MacBook 2015 for work and that feels much nicer and has
| better build quality. I don't plan on buying another XPS.
| alias_neo wrote:
| The author is speaking authoritatively while coming from a very
| narrow, specific perspective, which seems pretty common on
| hacker news with Apple users who write about "my platform is
| better than yours" to the point of being disingenuous.
|
| This type of thing pops up pretty often on HN from Apple users
| and it's almost always the same, I don't every see Linux users
| posting this sort of thing, different mentalities I guess.
|
| Full disclosure, I didn't finish reading because it quickly
| devolved into fanboyish propaganda. It showed the typical
| fanboyism we should all be grown up enough to get over by now
| and not just "use my platform, it's better for everyone because
| it suits me better than yours does".
|
| I (and my entire team; backend development) have been running
| Linux on our XPS 15's for the best part of a decade now. The
| Android development team at my place all run Linux too. The iOS
| Devs run on Apple devices, and the Windows Devs run on Windows,
| operations team all run Linux but they're using Latitudes (I
| think? The chunkier ones which still have ports and ethernet),
| management run a mix of Windows and Mac.
|
| I have been exclusively running Linux on my personal XPS 13 for
| 2-3 years (since buying it), and on my MSI gaming laptop 5-6
| years before then. I also run it on my gaming Desktop and have
| no major issues on any of those. I have been running 4K
| displays (which has gotten better in the past couple of years,
| particular with Gnome), and using Thunderbolt docks. My laptops
| and desktop sleep and wake just fine, CPU scaling works, I run
| a mixture of AMD Ryzen, and Intel Core CPUs and I've never had
| to touch a driver (Nvidia on work XPS is disabled at the
| moment). My desktop upgrades the Nvidia driver as part of its
| normal routine.
|
| Let's be clear, the email apps aren't great on Linux, but I'm a
| backend software engineer, I don't care about email, it's just
| a thing I need to use occasionally to reply to my colleagues
| and sometimes our clients. I don't need HTML emails, in fact,
| it's almost always junk if it is HTML, calender I use but don't
| need anything advanced, just to know when meetings etc are.
|
| Keyboard? My XPS 13 (2019) has much nicer keys than my work XPS
| 15 (2017) so they're improving for sure, however, I write code
| for a living, I have hundreds PSPSPSs worth of keyboards to
| type on, so the built in keyboard is a minor point. Use the
| tool for the job and all.
|
| What I'm not blind to is that gaming would be easier/more
| reliable if I ran Windows, you won't catch me telling everyone
| to switch to gaming on Linux, I have my reasons for doing it,
| but it can be done if you really want to, you'll have to accept
| some compromises.
|
| If you design/content create, Mac, I'm told is the best
| platform, you won't find me telling people to do that on Linux,
| but if you _really_ want, you can.
|
| Guess what, if you write server software targeting Linux, use
| Linux, it has the best tools for the job.
|
| The build quality of the XPSs is excellent. Unless I wanted to
| spend a lot more money on a specced thinkpad-carbon, I'd always
| buy an XPS over any other brand, they're super thin, very
| strong, great battery life, and DELL isn't hostile to you
| repairing them, you can buy a battery and change it yourself,
| the service manual is even on the website.
| aritmo wrote:
| I could not find information about the Linux distro he used. He
| says at some point "Wayland", which cancels Ubuntu.
|
| Which distro did he install?
| sofixa wrote:
| Ubuntu comes with Wayland, and on the login screen you can
| switch to it ( at least it does on mine that's a 16.10 updated
| to 18.04 to 20.04, and i've never installed Wayland myself)
| carlesfe wrote:
| I used Ubuntu Dell 18.?? then 20.04, the official ISOs from
| Dell, since the laptop is a 2018 XPS "Developer Edition"
| herpderperator wrote:
| > Yes, the apps I missed the most from the Mac were Mail.app,
| Calendar.app, and Preview.app.
|
| > I am an extreme power user
|
| Do those statements really go together? I'm not trying to stir
| anything; genuinely curious.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Being a power user doesn't mean that you have to run basic
| functionality like mail and calendar stuff from the terminal,
| and the GUI equivalents on Linux are not good enough
| fnord123 wrote:
| I saw that OP missed Calendar.app and I was convinced he was a
| liar. I regret that this is so aggressively ad hominem but
| Calendar has such obvious bugs I do not believe anyone - even
| the Calendar dev team - uses it.
|
| It has two jobs: store events and remind you about events.
| Calendar gives notifications 10 minutes into meetings I'm
| already in (because my phone tells me about the meetings). It
| is unfathomable that this could have been released if anyone
| uses it.
| carlesfe wrote:
| The article is built specifically around the irony of that
| contradiction
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I can't tell what the contradiction is.
|
| I am a Mac user but I largely use the Google suite web apps,
| which I guess is the polar opposite of being a "power user".
|
| What's contradictory however about someone using Mail or
| Calendar and being a power user? Is there a world of
| productivity apps that are much better designed than those?
| Or is anything below "I do everything in emacs" not a power
| user?
|
| Saludos.
| eertami wrote:
| The Google web suite apps work quite well, in contrast to
| the Calendar app which I've never managed to get working.
|
| I think the argument is more "How can a power user survive
| with something so flagrantly non-functional?"
| [deleted]
| elif wrote:
| I think OP would be happy running Windows Subsystem for Linux
| (WSL)
|
| Using windows for the popup/productivity/keybind easy mode stuff,
| while running Linux applications natively for development.
| bengale wrote:
| This is my exact experience. My current setup involves a powerful
| Linux rig under my desk that I use remotely over SSH for
| development work but my Mac is my 'frontend'. But for a while I
| tried to use that Linux box exclusively.
|
| This has been working really well for me, docker runs faster and
| I can get a lot more bang for my buck performance wise. Plus I
| get to keep using things like fantastical. I much prefer the Mac
| UI as well tbh and seem to not run into whatever bugs people seem
| to complain about.
| tumblewit wrote:
| As someone who is comfortable with linux and macOS and also
| someone who used an M1 MBA here is my take because this article
| does not do justice to each of the platform pros and cons:
|
| 1. The M1 Macs are amazing. If you are the kind of person who
| needs a GUI and involves lot of app related work go for it. (this
| person seems more interested in stuff like that so linux ain't
| gonna cut it for him). The cons? A super restrictive platform
| (even more than it was under intel) and a very pricey hardware
| affair where getting anything fixed is hard. My speaker was
| faulty after my 2016 mbp already had a broken display thanks to
| apple. I hope new MBPs do a much better job at hardware after the
| keyboards that seem to be fixed now.
|
| 2. Linux can do everything almost that Windows / macOS can. But
| not necessarily better. In GUI it's still a mess but wayland
| actually fixed tearing so I'm not sure what is the deal here.
| Overall I think you need to spend time with linux to become
| comfortable vs expecting a distro to solve all your requirements.
| If you really want the fine control go with Arch it's usually
| good for cutting edge hardware.
| Theodores wrote:
| I like where you are coming from, however I think we need to
| recognise that Windows and OSX are proprietary consumer
| operating systems whereas Linux is not.
|
| To take an automotive analogy, road cars and SUVs are designed
| for the rules of the road and they come with things like a
| warranty. Meanwhile race cars are different. You might have to
| put the engine in yourself and good luck with the warranty.
| Comparing the road car (SUV or truck) with the race car is not
| a fair comparison. The race car doesn't have the cup holders,
| sat nav, seats in the back, airbags, central door locking or
| tyres for the road. In everything that matters to most drivers
| the race car is just useless. But most drivers are not racing
| drivers, so what would they know.
| minimaul wrote:
| for 1. The cons? A super restrictive platform (even more than
| it was under intel) You can still boot arbitrary unsigned OSes
| - Apple still allows this, but it is obviously going to take
| time for other OSes to grow support for apple's custom
| hardware. So it's still a computer you can control if you want.
|
| for 2., wayland is still a very rough experience imo (I
| periodically try it on an all-intel system, which ought to be a
| good target as everything is OSS supported, etc). Lot of apps
| still don't have native wayland backends (although this is
| improving!) and it seems generally less stable than boring old
| X11 for me.
| kaba0 wrote:
| What compositor did you try for wayland?
| minimaul wrote:
| Mostly kwin, but also sway a little. I understand that
| GNOME is a bit further along than either of these, though?
| tumblewit wrote:
| True that its still new but with zero support from Apple this
| is going to require some serious reverse engineering to get
| anything useful especially with the GPU drivers.
| nathias wrote:
| Apple is for people who want the generic apple experience, if you
| want to customize its the worst of all. I run arch linux on
| thinkpad carbon x1 and its the best laptop I ever owned or seen,
| mostly because I care much more about my own customized workflow
| (tile management, fast terminal instantiation, vim keys
| everywhere, CLI apps when possible etc.).
| unanswered wrote:
| For opening a very large and organizationally complex PDF like
| the ARMv8 Architecture Reference Manual, Preview.app is the only
| PDF reader, on any platform, which I would recommend. The
| competition is simply a joke in comparison. I also like it for
| filling out PDF forms; I think I ended up using a web service
| (!!) the last time I wanted to do that on another platform.
|
| But aside from Preview.app, I don't find anything commendable
| about macOS. I've remained on an old and vulnerable version to
| ensure I don't lose control of my own hardware, and what's more,
| I will never upgrade that hardware given how bad the new hardware
| seems.
|
| In short, I'm just waiting for a Preview.app clone/same-weight-
| class competitor on Windows and I'll be off to one of Msft's
| first party laptops.
| cryptica wrote:
| As an power user (dev), I would never consider switching away
| from Kubuntu for any other OS.
| apareis wrote:
| That I find interesting. Been trying KDE flavour more recently
| and the only distro that would work for me is openSUSE
| (Tumbleweed) KDE. Everything was pretty much perfect. I've
| tried KDE Neon and Kubuntu, both didn't have the correct dark
| icons for LibreOffice (as an example). As a developer about to
| switch companies, I'm now faced with a forced switch to Linux
| or if I want I could also stay on Apple (M1). I'm really
| inclined to say goodbye to Apple, as I have suffered too many
| uncomfortable changes over the most recent 12 years or so. I
| feel home in KDE, tried Gnome which I find too hard.
| cryptica wrote:
| Agreed, KDE is great. The default theme is somewhat
| disappointing but once configured, it beats OSX and Windows
| hands down. It's extremely configurable.
|
| I also wouldn't mind Ubuntu/Gnome but I encountered some
| touchpad issues with my new HP laptop and I didn't want to
| fiddle too much with the Ubuntu drivers and internals.
| Kubuntu was just more configurable including the touchpad
| driver.
| ur-whale wrote:
| >Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
|
| Knee-jerk reaction : good for you.
|
| I did the same back in '08 and never felt a need to go back to
| prison, however nice the curtains and wallpaper are.
| richardfey wrote:
| I haven't (consciously) sent an email with pictures in
| years...surprised that author uses a lot of them.
| carlesfe wrote:
| I have a job where I have to communicate with non-technical
| people
| addicted wrote:
| I don't disagree with the author's observations, but I think it's
| important to note that basically what they describe is that
| "Linux is not a better OSX than OSX", as opposed to "Linux is not
| a better OS than OSX".
|
| The latter may also be true, but that's not what they describe in
| this article. Because in this article what they are trying to
| describe is trying to setup Linux to do the things they did on
| OSX the way they did it on OSX.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I think the three major OSes are now sufficiently different
| that calling any of them "better" than the others is
| meaningless. All three have issues but they are in different
| places. And many of the things people complain about are just
| different from what they are used to.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Some things not mentioned in this article:
|
| The Pantheon desktop environment (default in elementaryOS, a
| Linux distro) is the most similar to macOS, in case that's what
| you are looking for.
|
| Kupfer is an alternative to Alfred. Tilix is an alternative to
| iTerm2. Instead of using Crossover, just use SoftMaker
| FreeOffice.
|
| I would use Xournal++ rather than Xournal.
|
| Gimp has a lot of annoyances right now, notably: uses GTK 2 which
| doesn't support HiDPI. Gimp 2.99.2 (development version) adds
| support for GTK 3 but it's unstable and crashes often. Hopefully
| Gimp 3 is released soon. For now, I use Krita.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| This guy was not a developer, or at least that's not his main
| function. I have switched, and find it more productive, but I
| never have to use word....
| minimaul wrote:
| From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year
| (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so
| years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple
| actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these
| pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these
| are super subjective!):
|
| - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely
| equivalent. First class PDF support, ability to easily annotate
| anything, makes basic PDF editing easy.
|
| - I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures, and emulating
| these on linux doesn't end up working well. There is an ongoing
| project for this but it's very Ubuntu-centric for now. I am
| hopeful this will help the whole ecosystem improve though! This
| is still a pain for me on a desktop because my work setup uses a
| touchpad as the pointer device.
|
| - it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor
| setups with X11, and X11 doesn't support a mix of DPIs for
| displays without scaling tricks that make text look awful on the
| low-DPI displays. Wayland was promising here last time I tried,
| but Wayland itself still has a lot of rough edges for a desktop.
| Plus since last time I tried I have replaced my last low DPI
| monitor on my dev setup, so this ought to be a point I can ignore
| going forward :)
|
| - Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've
| never been able to get on with the console clients, and I
| actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay.
|
| - My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful
| linux experience. This is getting better - they're producing a
| native app now. Said native app needs to support the local
| browser extensions though!
|
| - I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features for
| Apple OSes far too much. This is mostly relatively simple things,
| that produce disproportionate pain - eg cross-device copy+paste,
| browser tab syncing, bookmark syncing, etc. Yes, Firefox has
| Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync stuff too, but there's
| nothing as all-encompassing.
| mroche wrote:
| _My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly
| awful linux experience. This is getting better - they 're
| producing a native app now. Said native app needs to support
| the local browser extensions though!_
|
| The desktop app is pretty good now, and if you're using the
| Beta browser extension, it can talk to the desktop app to
| unlock. This feature is still in development, though, and has
| some restrictions.
| minimaul wrote:
| That's great! I've seen it make superb progress over the last
| year or so. Looking forward to it hitting feature-parity with
| mac and windows :)
| fallingknife wrote:
| Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and
| combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.
| theobeers wrote:
| Do be careful, though, when collating PDFs with Preview. I've
| had several experiences where the resulting file works fine
| in Preview, but can't be opened by other PDF readers, e.g.
| Acrobat Reader. Share the file with a non-Mac user and
| they'll be scratching their head...
|
| I have to do a _lot_ of PDF manipulation for my work, and
| after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there 's no
| substitute for Acrobat Pro.
| fallingknife wrote:
| What I have found is that when annotating PDF's the
| annotations show up, except on Acrobat. Never could figure
| out how to fix.
| nsb1 wrote:
| Wow...TIL...
| shaan7 wrote:
| Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS,
| a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover.
| Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some
| sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very
| useful feature. Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.
| argvargc wrote:
| Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS.
| So many tremendously useful things are _hidden_.
|
| Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can
| understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive -
| try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk
| messing up the important files they're working with by
| randomly dragging things onto other things just to see
| what happens.
|
| Just _tell us_ how to use it.
|
| Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison
| seems to have understood this basic concept of educating
| the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far
| behind especially on macOS.
| shaan7 wrote:
| My guess is that this is the compromise they strike to
| reduce the "number of options" -\\_(tsu)_/-
| prestonbriggs wrote:
| Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple
| won't publish manuals.
| SirHound wrote:
| Yeah I found out you can combine two videos in QuickTime by
| dragging one into the other. Amazing but I had to Google it
| Tyr42 wrote:
| It also works on Gif images. You can take apart the frames.
| aidos wrote:
| You can shift/cmd select a few pages and drop them out into
| finder as a new pdf too.
| CalChris wrote:
| I use Preview for merging + deleting pages which is rare but
| useful but otherwise I use Skim.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I've lost hope that Linux will ever be able to provide an
| experience on the level of the Mac, I'd like to move away from
| Apple myself too.
|
| Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's
| strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as
| coherent and interoperable as the Mac.
|
| How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering,
| copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widget
| and text field in the OS if every framework an application is
| built with and every part of the OS chain can be swapped out
| for something else and they're all made with distributed teams
| with no one at the helm to be the one to say "Drag and drop is
| broken in your app, you might not use it or care but others do,
| you need to fix it". or "Why does the text look weird in your
| app?"
|
| This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care
| about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think
| Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in
| the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we
| hit critical mass of that.
|
| Not to mention the specific things I point out here that make
| the Mac great are being eroded away as more and more Mac apps
| are just electron wrapped React with custom text field
| components that disable OS spell checking and things like that.
| mistersquid wrote:
| > I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to
| have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future
| and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical
| mass of that.
|
| I don't understand comments like this because iOS apps as
| well as macOS apps are built using macOS devices. While it
| may come to pass that iOS becomes a viable platform to
| develop iOS and macOS (?!) apps, Apple cannot proceed by
| removing the ability to develop apps on both platforms.
|
| Apple has proved itself a canny organization with regard to
| the development and maintenance of its platforms (bugs and
| pain points notwithstanding), so it seems highly unlikely
| they would move forward in a way that prevents the
| development and maintenance of those major platforms.
| utxaa wrote:
| i would move to windows/wsl then. windows UI and tools are
| vastly underrated. start here if you're interested:
|
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/scott-
| hanselmans-2021-ultimat...
| ericmay wrote:
| > This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care
| about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think
| Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications
| in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated
| once we hit critical mass of that.
|
| They'll be running apps, but the lines between iPhone, iPad,
| and Mac will be blurred and I think this is fine. Similar to
| how apps now may have different features or layouts as you
| switch from iPhone to iPad.
|
| I'm a little less worried about them deprecating macOS. They
| could do it tomorrow really but there doesn't seem to be a
| need to do so. I think the goal here is to actually make the
| Mac stronger by unlocking access to the iOS App Library. It's
| a good goal. I know some will complain about the iOS apps not
| being open source or something but probably 95% of users
| (myself included) don't really care. I find open source
| software extremely valuable, but I don't care if Flappy Bird
| or Office 365 are open source. I just need to use the
| software and get on with my day.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to
| have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future
| and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical
| mass of that.
|
| The Mac sits in an awkward position indeed, especially with
| Apple giving a touchpad and keyboard to the iPad Pro.
| spfzero wrote:
| I don't worry about them deprecating MacOS. Apple has some
| important and beneficial constituencies for MacOS, not least
| of which is developers developing apps for iOS, watchOS, etc.
| Music and video production, etc. I know that by percent of
| revenue, iOS has the lion's share, but I think they realize
| that MacOS has an important role to play in keeping the
| entire enterprise working together.
| hk1337 wrote:
| > My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly
| awful linux experience.
|
| This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don't sync to
| 1Password.com though and that's all that is available, so it's
| more than just a poor experience for me.
|
| I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that's
| had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird
| issue that when I edited something in Keepass, it was
| unreadable in Linux. I didn't have a problem if I shared it via
| USB drive though.
| Delk wrote:
| I've been keeping a Keepass database on Dropbox (encrypted
| with password + key file, neither of which are stored on
| Dropbox, obviously) for a while, and haven't noticed any
| issues with syncing. I'm mostly using it from a single
| device, though, but I don't think it should be likely for the
| sharing to introduce problems even if I made heavier use of
| multiple devices. It's not like the database is constantly
| being modified.
|
| This might be a bit of a lazy solution, but it has been
| working well enough for me.
| brightball wrote:
| It's the reason I switched to LastPass and then Bitwarden
| finally.
| lhl wrote:
| I ran 1Password 4.x on WINE successfully for a long while but
| the browser extensions started breaking so I eventually bit
| the bullet and switched to Bitwarden (running my own instance
| with bitwarden_rs). The import wasn't perfect (it doesn't
| handle attachments or tags), and the browser extension can
| sometimes be laggy, but so far it's at least worked
| everywhere I need it, which is more than can be said for 1PW
| or anything else.
| gspr wrote:
| Pass is fantastic: https://www.passwordstore.org/
| masswerk wrote:
| > _I 'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures_
|
| It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-
| touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a
| decline.
|
| Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.
| gumby wrote:
| I use all sorts of multi-touch gestures on my iPad. Less,
| it's true, on the phone.
|
| It is annoying that many web pages and apps can't zoom in/out
| on iOS. On the Mac it's trivial to zoom the whole screen.
| Fatalist_ma wrote:
| Hmm what decline? The only thing that comes to mind is the
| removal of force-touch but that's not a multi-touch gesture.
| oblio wrote:
| When multi-touch first appeared it was touted as a Holy
| Grail of UIs.
|
| The only multi-touch gesture that is in widespread usage
| across all mobile platforms is pinch to zoom. The rest of
| the multi-touch gestures are probably used 100 times less
| (maybe less, I can't even remember the last time I used 2+
| fingers to do something on my Android devices, except for
| pinch to zoom).
| easygenes wrote:
| Multi-touch doesn't get in the way of the screen on Mac. Also
| doesn't require changing how you hold the device.
| masswerk wrote:
| The point being, multi-touch was what got the the
| smartphone revolution going, especially on the Web. Whereas
| now...
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| What do you mean by that?
| masswerk wrote:
| > _What do you mean by that?_
|
| Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like
| the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these
| remained niche and required specially skinned websites
| for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with
| `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really
| the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to
| navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the
| killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App
| Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success
| of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch
| feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set
| to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,
| initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and
| dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive
| killed multi-touch - or, at least, rendered it
| disposable.)
|
| (Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or
| three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction
| on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any
| standardization, but this may be just my own observation
| and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use
| for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really
| the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-
| touch lives on with any significance.)
| 83457 wrote:
| Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new
| feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those
| with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of
| this was capacitive touch screen technology that few
| other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper
| resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do
| anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I
| don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally
| even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads
| on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years
| later.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Yeah. The T-Mobile G1 lacked multitouch gestures. You
| could hack them in though as the hardware supported it. I
| think it was a patent issue or someething which was why
| it was left out.
| dTal wrote:
| I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens
| were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction
| model had for a decade been oriented around styluses -
| handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and
| resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with
| a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as
| smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical
| horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the
| time the iPhone came along.
| easygenes wrote:
| I bought an iPhone on day one in 2007. For me it was more
| about a nearly-all-screen device with a usable browser
| and navigation than anything else at that point. Jeez,
| that's still mostly what I use it for. Pinch is certainly
| nice, but I hardly thought about multi touch when looking
| at the value proposition. The Apple Pencil is what got me
| to finally buy an iPad (and immediately miss the side-
| click I've been used to with computer pens since circa
| 2001).
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| > multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution
| going
|
| Massive citation needed. When I bought the first iPod
| touch (at the time it was a gen 1 iPhone without the GSM
| modem) it was because it had a real web browser and not
| the BS 'mobile' browsers on my Windows Mobile smartphone.
| I could actually visit a store's website and find their
| hours, check if an item was in stock, etc. There wasn't
| even an app store back then... IIRC multitouch was only
| used for zooming into photos in the photos app.
| masswerk wrote:
| Pinch & zoom was _the_ killer app to navigate normal
| websites (as opposed to dedicated XHTML + handheld-
| stylesheet). This is now for the most dead with `meta
| name= "viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-
| scale=1"` as a standard.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _- Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything
| remotely equivalent. First class PDF support, ability to easily
| annotate anything, makes basic PDF editing easy._
|
| How is the generation of 2D bar codes that many (government)
| forms use when you enter information into the various fields?
| popeathlete wrote:
| No offense, but this largely reads to me like "I don't wanna
| use Linux because I wanna use Mac". If you want to move to a
| different system, you can't expect to get the same thing.
| Really, the only complaints I can agree with now are 2 and 3,
| the rest is just invalid. You've got kdeconnect gsconnect
| nextcloud keepassxc many, many configurable mail clients,
| especially the beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM
| suite, Okular has all three features you mentioned. You just
| have to put in a bit of work, it's a DIY system after all.
| RScholar wrote:
| I'm not sure that the criticisms for the article and parent
| comment are quite so easy to dismiss wholesale, but I do
| concur that many of them are actually criticisms of the GNOME
| DE and not so much Linux itself. In my experience as a daily
| Linux user it was somewhere between 2-3 years ago that KDE
| Plasma surpassed GNOME as the most productive desktop
| environment for Linux, and the distance between the two only
| appears to widening still. I would love to see what impact
| the simple choice to swap plain Ubuntu for Kubuntu would have
| had on their conclusions.
| minimaul wrote:
| I actually use KDE generally on Linux, I find GNOME very
| difficult to get along with :)
|
| edit: and desktop distro of choice is generally Arch for me
| - it's been a long time since I used ubuntu.
| danjac wrote:
| " beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM suite"
|
| Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop?
| The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up
| requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing
| I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and
| use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.
| popeathlete wrote:
| Yeah, Akonadi isn't great right now, but KMail is a very
| nice client.
| ragingrobot wrote:
| "Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the
| desktop?"
|
| It's been a few months since I gave up, but IIRC Akonadi
| has a few storage backends.
|
| I was looking for a GUI mail client to replace using my
| various webmail based interfaces. As much as I love Plasma,
| KMail and its ilk were painful. Akonadi still has issues
| all these years later, and gave me trouble setting it up.
| The messages produced are less than helpful.
|
| Once KMail was running, it was fine to use, albeit with an
| occasional crash, just at the wrong times so it got
| annoying. I stopped using it.
| toyg wrote:
| Akonadi was an ambitious idea that was really badly
| implemented. I've not used KDE for ages so I have no idea
| what the current state of play is - I think they now
| disable it by default. Someone should have probably
| rewritten it with sqlite, back then.
| minimaul wrote:
| I did explicitly state that my points were very subjective -
| they are personal opinions and I didn't try to hide that. I
| also did not try to hide that I like macOS - that's why I use
| it now, after all. As I explicitly said, my attempts with a
| linux laptop setup have been primarily an insurance policy
| against Apple continuing to run the Mac into the ground - not
| out of idealism.
|
| But answers to a few specific points:
|
| - Okular fails to render weird PDFs for me - things like NXP
| datasheets are notable for this. It is my usual PDF reader on
| Linux though. Additionally, the few features I called out
| were not an exhaustive list, just examples. Preview also
| makes it very easy to do things like combine PDFs or remove
| pages from existing PDFs, or do things like crop all of the
| pages in a PDF in one operation - this is surprisingly
| useful!.
|
| - tearing is something I have never managed to actually
| completely eliminate. I can get rid of it for the most part
| on single display setups (although setting TearFree
| introduces video stuttering on intel), but on multi-display
| setups I have never managed to lose it - on both intel &
| amd's OSS stacks, and on nvidia's proprietary driver. I fully
| admit this is something that disproportionately annoys me and
| that others may not care about, but it's a solved issue on
| Windows and macOS and has been for years. Using wayland
| instead of X11 resulted in a lot of apps getting very poor
| performance or flat breaking when rendering - but every time
| I try wayland it has gotten a lot better since the last time.
| But replacing a 30+ year old windowing system with a new one
| is a pretty huge undertaking, so I'm not surprised it's
| taking a while!
|
| - things like kdeconnect/gsconnect etc don't support
| integration with iOS. It's not their fault - iOS is
| restrictive and Apple keep it that way very deliberately, but
| it achieves their aim very well - it keeps people tied in to
| Apple's ecosystem. Losing all of the niceties at once is
| pretty jarring - and even if I replace everything at once, eg
| going macOS -> linux and iOS -> android, etc it still doesn't
| end up as fully integrated.
| keymone wrote:
| You're too dismissive, Linux apps are terrible compared to
| Mac and it's a big reason preventing me from switching.
|
| That you got used to using crappy software doesn't mean I
| want to do the same.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Daily macOS and Linux user here.
|
| Linux does have a lot of crappy and quality software. Using
| the better ones changes the experience a lot. Not all
| software on the macOS is top notch either. There are some
| amazing apps, but most of them can be replicated on Linux
| or have better equivalents.
|
| I think you're dismissing something here.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac
|
| And it's this sort of absolutism that continues to solidify
| the "cult" like impression of the Apple consumerism
| culture.
| lordgroff wrote:
| It is however true that majority of Linux software that
| is excellent can leak over to Mac since OSS can be ported
| over, but the other way around doesn't really work.
|
| Having said that, i have all the tools I need on Linux,
| excepting office, which I run via wine. I wish I didn't
| have to, but what can you do.
|
| I also find a lot of people complain about to be simple
| habit; I've been using Linux 25ish years, and was an
| early (too early) adaptor of GNOME 3, and MacOS just
| pisses me off. I know that most of my complaints are
| simply me not being used to it though. I could learn to
| live with it I'm sure, but I'm not moving to a platform
| that's as hostile to users as MacOS. I'd rather move to
| Windows.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Mac since OSS can be ported over, but the other way
| around doesn't really work.
|
| Why then, is brew still considerably worse than apt, and
| Finder worse than...anything on Linux? You don't need the
| source code to replicate functionality. Additionally,
| some tools are better adapted to the philosophy of their
| 'native' desktops,so they have a challenge architecturaly
| and with the users mindsets/muscle-memory when ported
| across platforms.
|
| This is all to say, I agree that it's pretty subjective:
| I'll take keyboard shortcuts over mouse gestures - so I
| won't "get" why Mac lovers emphasize trackpad performance
| so much, and I guess they won't "get" why I rave about
| system-wide shortcuts and configurability either. I use
| MacOs for work, but all my home computers run Linux. GNU
| core-utils are better than the BSD versions that ship on
| Macs - I will die on this hill
| joana035 wrote:
| Not even 3.
|
| I don't remember seeing tearing on my Linux for a heck of a
| long time.
| yakubin wrote:
| Try watching Netflix in Firefox or Chromium. Or enable
| smooth scrolling in Firefox and hit PageDown a couple
| times. The issue with scrolling can be resolved by enabling
| hardware acceleration, but this isn't the default in
| Firefox and the obscure config breaks from time to time.
| Until hardware acceleration becomes the default, not an
| opt-in, I consider this feature broken.
|
| Aside from Netflix, I'll sometimes see tearing even on
| YouTube, when I put it on fullscreen. Luckily, there is mpv
| with builtin youtube-dl support, which solves this problem.
| But I haven't found a solution for Netflix, other than
| rebooting into Windows, or switching to my Mac.
| Delk wrote:
| I wonder if there are significant differences between
| video hardware or drivers, or perhaps even generations.
| I've watched Netflix, a local HBO streaming service and
| YouTube on Linux for years on Intel graphics without
| noticing tearing, and yes, back when there was tearing
| when watching video on a previous (pretty old) machine I
| had, I did notice it.
| dkersten wrote:
| I actually experienced pretty bad tearing running i3 on a
| new (at the time, last August) Dell XPS 13, but switching
| to Wayland/sway fixed it and its been running flawlessly on
| that since.
| somehnguy wrote:
| Really? Last year when we were in the office multiple of my
| coworkers had awful tearing on their Linux machines of
| multiple distros. I'm sure it was related to their specific
| hardware/driver setups but still. These were workstation
| class machines.
|
| I can't remember ever seeing tearing on my MacOS machines.
| And I'm even using a cheapo $15 DisplayPort adapter for my
| third monitor.
| Delk wrote:
| I haven't seen tearing in years either except in somewhat
| exotic cases [1], so I wouldn't be surprised that there
| are other people who haven't either. Nor am I really
| surprised that some people _do_ get tearing.
|
| My recent experiences have been exclusively with Intel
| integrated GPUs on a laptop, which seem to be a fairly
| reliable option in terms of desktop compatibility and
| integration nowadays. I don't know what the current state
| of e.g. proprietary NVidia drivers is, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if you ran into more problems in terms of
| compatibility with the rest of the desktop system
| (including stuff like tearing) with those than with some
| of the better open source drivers.
|
| Workstation-class machines might thus actually be more
| prone to tearing if they require using proprietary
| drivers.
|
| That doesn't make it any less of a problem if your
| coworkers' machines did exhibit problems, of course.
|
| [1] I've seen tearing e.g. when playing a web video in
| the Steam client, but I find that more of a corner case
| than browsers or general desktop use.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I don't think it's even a matter of wanting to use Mac. What
| I read was "I simply don't want change. Full stop."
|
| Subjeectively, being attached to an email client feels odd to
| me. That's what the brower is for; same for a PW manager. If
| Bitwarden has a client, I wouldn't even know. The browser ext
| works just fine. I used to use LastPass.
|
| Ya can't have change without change. It's not necessarily
| easy. But it's always true: No delta, no glory.
| minimaul wrote:
| I tend to like native apps a lot rather than browser
| equivalents.
|
| I self-host my mail server and use an IMAP+SMTP client to
| talk to it - I don't use something like gmail. $work uses
| gmail and the web ui frustrates the hell out of me (and I
| pity anyone whose only experience with a native email
| client is being paired with gmail, because their IMAP
| implementation makes it rather painful!).
|
| For password manager, 1password has a native app and
| browser extensions that talk to that local native app.
| There are browser only ones too, but I prefer the native
| app integration because it shares unlock state between all
| of the extensions and the full desktop client all in one
| go.
|
| But you're right, you can't have change without things
| actually changing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and
| what you're used to, and the benefits of what you get from
| changing. For me, for now that ends up sitting on the side
| of macOS. For others, that might be Linux or even Windows.
| I don't think any of those positions are wrong, it's all
| about what works for each person.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It's absolutely subjective / personal. That being said,
| (non-mobile) OSs are less crucial, provided you have a
| browser. For a while I was having to move back and forth
| between Win and Apple. Being more browser-based made that
| less friction-y. Frankly, I think that's universally a
| good position to be in. That is, ultimately I don't care
| what OS. I'll be okay.
|
| Humans adapt. It's what we do. Yet so often we mistake
| wants for needs.
| latexr wrote:
| > I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid.
|
| The parent poster is clear on what they _like_ (or don't) and
| even prefaced everything with "and these are super
| subjective". Personal preference doesn't become invalid when
| another disagrees, nor does parent seem to be fishing for
| agreement.
| popeathlete wrote:
| Excuse the morning haze clouding my vision, guess I focused
| on writing without focusing on reading enough. Invalid is
| not the right word.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Re: mail client - it's been quite a while since I last used it,
| but I really liked Sylpheed on Linux. Lightweight, good
| looking, doesn't get in your way. You might want to give it a
| try if you haven't already.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| All your points are great but for cross device copy paste,
| syncing with computer and phone, KDE Connect is excellent and
| seamless (I'm still trying to figure out how to connect my
| Android phone with my Mac laptop in the same way)
| krotos wrote:
| > - I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features
|
| Next time you give linux a try, you might want to check out
| https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ and https://syncthing.net/. I'm not
| a Mac user but I'd be surprised if between these you'd be
| missing any features.
| smoldesu wrote:
| +1 for KDE Connect. I had a friend who nearly shit their
| pants when they realized that "Continuity Clipboard" and
| "Airdrop" weren't iPhone-exclusive features.
| ochoseis wrote:
| I just wish you could use KDE Connect on iOS... is there
| anything in that realm?
| moistbar wrote:
| Regarding Preview, Gnome has an app called sushi that acts
| similarly, though in a read-only way. I don't usually use it
| much, but it seems to work on most videos and photos I've
| thrown at it.
|
| As far as phone integration, KDEConnect is quite good, though
| it only works if the devices are in the same network.
| smoldesu wrote:
| >Yes, Firefox has Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync
| stuff too, but there's nothing as all-encompassing.
|
| You're looking for Nextcloud.
| robert_foss wrote:
| > - Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've
| never been able to get on with the console clients, and I
| actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay.
|
| If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend
| MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished.
|
| https://getmailspring.com/
| vamega wrote:
| What's the caveat with mailing lists?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I took that to mean if email was your day job you'd need to
| see emails in Outlook and Gmail, not a potentially great
| but uncommon mail client.
| grishka wrote:
| The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block
| access from your country.
|
| What the...
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor
| setups with X11,
|
| I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't
| remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're
| overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops
| with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the
| reason.
|
| I hate touchpads.
|
| I don't do PDF editing.
|
| Everything's a tradeoff.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I was wondering if I just wasn't very sensitive to tearing,
| because I haven't noticed it. One setup is a 4K 46" or Dell
| 30" next to a 4K laptop, the other is 4K 46" with two 1080P
| wings in portrait.
| com_kieffer wrote:
| If you rotate a monitor (portrait mode) screen tearing
| becomes very frequent.
| minimaul wrote:
| +1
|
| I do indeed have a portrait monitor for throwing terminals
| on to, and it's the worst place for making tearing visible.
| cymor wrote:
| I have a portrait 4k monitor in my setup and haven't seen
| any tearing.
| Delk wrote:
| Out of curiosity (not to question), is this on Xorg or
| Wayland?
|
| I rarely use my external monitor, and I can't even remember
| the last time I had used it in portrait mode, so these
| comments made me realize there could be use cases (and not
| just hardware or drivers) that trigger tearing that I just
| hadn't encountered. But I just took a quick shot at it, and
| I didn't see tearing, at least not on YouTube, nor when
| moving a window around.
|
| I'm on Wayland with Intel graphics.
| opencl wrote:
| The recently released GNOME 40 has some new gestures enabled
| out of the box (3 finger vertical swipe for application
| switcher and horizontal for workspace switcher) and they work
| much better than previous attempts I've seen at touchpad
| gesture on Linux. The animation actually tracks your fingers
| now!
| akdor1154 wrote:
| And can you change them? Or is gnome still less customisable
| than even macOS?
| smoldesu wrote:
| From what I've seen, it's very customizable. There's a
| custom Gestures app that allows you to bind an infinite
| amount of gestures to any shell command you want.
|
| >is gnome still less customizable than even macOS?
|
| Gnome has been more flexible since 2003, seeing as I
| haven't seen someone successfully replace the MacOS
| stylesheet. On Gnome, it's a 2 minute process, tops.
| Bad_CRC wrote:
| I use Preview _a lot_ just for batch resizing, I use KDE as
| desktop on my home computer and while Gwenview seems to be on
| par, it just cannot do batch resizing...
| wil421 wrote:
| The only thing I like about windows is the image preview. You
| can easily scroll through a folder and look at all the images
| while you window is maximized. You can do the same in MacOS but
| I don't think gallery is as good.
|
| Previews capabilities are much better than any any built in
| tool or Adobe reader.
| dghf wrote:
| > I am an extreme power user, to the point that many of the keys
| on my keyboard don't do what the keycap says.
|
| Is that really the definition of an extreme power user? I
| switched the layout on my work MacBook to UK and remapped caps
| lock to command, but I'm in no way a Mac power user, let alone an
| extreme one.
| kinghtown wrote:
| You've misread. He wasn't suggesting that the process for
| remapping a keyboard falls under power user, as in
| understanding how to do that. Remapping keys on a keyboard so
| they are exactly how you want them for your workflow definitely
| is the behaviour of a power user.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| The author doesn't state whether they installed Linux on a laptop
| that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual "Linux laptop".
| There's a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying
| "Macs are shite".
|
| I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by
| pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted
| Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a
| Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles
| with the build quality).
|
| I'm kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I'm not
| happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS.
|
| I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never
| bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn't use
| mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple
| applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of
| my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be
| doing.
|
| I'm now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I
| like it. And it's great. Couldn't be happier. Except for Zoom's
| Linux client, (but Spotify's Linux client is now pretty good, so
| there's hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet.
|
| But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and
| learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with
| my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that's better
| than "oh it's gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to
| get it fixed". Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in
| rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the
| Macbook in the first place). It's MY computer, not Apple's.
| That's actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn't
| matter in practice.
|
| Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. And if it
| doesn't "just work" there's f-all you can do except take it to
| the Store. And usually they'll just shrug and hand you a new one,
| and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure,
| that's OK. But it's not what I want.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I considered buying a System76 Lemur not too long ago because I
| liked the machine's specs and enjoy popOS, but after seeing QC
| issues with System76's OEM decided against it and got a
| Thinkpad X1 Nano instead.
|
| Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes
| though.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Thinkpads have always been the authentic Linux experience in
| my eyes, especially the models after 2009. I love what modern
| companies are doing with Linux laptops, but the Thinkpad is
| still the same, unrivaled, robust monster it has always been.
| There's nothing special about it, and that's why it's
| special. It feels standard issue, and hardware failure is a
| lot less sporadic than Macbooks.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I am using Pop!_OS on Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 - everything
| works (though switching between dedicated and integrated
| graphics has rough edges). Perfectly fine for normal use.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| PopOS! is really nice and I am thinking about installing it
| on my (non-System76) hardware, instead of Ubuntu.
| schmorptron wrote:
| It is! The only issue afaik is that it doesn't support
| wayland yet, so you won't be getting any of the nice
| tracked trackpad gestures (unless something has changed
| since I last checked).
| zepto wrote:
| > Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more.
|
| This is essentially a false statement for all intents and
| purposes.
|
| Apple software does "just work" with Apple hardware.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| It really doesn't anymore.
|
| In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into
| the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a
| question of (acquired?) taste.
|
| However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer
| screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space.
|
| Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that
| just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as
| shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail.
|
| If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen
| also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in
| Mail it will attempt to open it in safari _on the same screen
| as Mail_. No, it won 't attempt to tile the windows, just
| stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't.
| In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail.
| If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or
| whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the
| animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to
| Mail.
|
| Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab.
| Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried
| removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab
| page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening
| from time to time.
|
| Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active
| button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the
| window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read
| the text.
|
| Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the
| tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or
| the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to
| the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto,
| and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone
| related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The
| clock is always on time.
|
| I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some
| reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white
| on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color
| in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?).
| In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of
| the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to
| click it twice to actually do something useful. You might
| argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the
| same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on
| my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have
| never seen it happen.
|
| Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it
| won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to
| almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says
| it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah,
| actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a
| while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened
| with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app).
|
| Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first
| started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac
| may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during
| the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data"
| from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public
| betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment
| and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away
| even without copying over anything from the previous install.
|
| So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I
| really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to
| my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are
| _new_ issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for
| years and that worked _well_.
|
| Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to
| use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting
| out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my
| work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (some cheap HP
| probook from work that rubs my wrists when I type) but
| sitting at a desk all day it doesn't matter since I'm not
| physically touching it.
| lallysingh wrote:
| My mac kernel panicked weekly for the last year. The software
| had stopped major development for the last 5 years on any
| area that doesn't help major media production or make it more
| like iOS.
|
| But the software does work. It just doesn't do much
| interesting stuff anymore.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Apple software does "just work" with Apple hardware.
|
| This is essentially a false statement for all intents and
| purposes.
|
| Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX,
| etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest
| today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
| zepto wrote:
| > being immune to bugs
|
| This is a total straw man.
|
| "Just works" has never meant free of bugs. It means not
| having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning,
| and setup.
|
| Things do just work.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > This is a total straw man.
|
| You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means
| what you think it means.
|
| No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs
| interfere with the notion that something "just works".
| When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've
| found they often do in the course of using macOS daily,
| like when I can't open firewall ports for development or
| share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur
| update broke the password prompt for editing restricted
| things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when
| apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the
| board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce
| to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor
| "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper
| cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck
| itself before I can actually type in a password, or
| constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open
| things by default (meaning that every so often I end up
| with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor
| window when I try to open an XML file because macOS _yet
| again_ decided to reset the default app to fucking
| XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I
| plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy)
|
| Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to
| defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely
| ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX,
| too. So on that note:
|
| > It means not having to do a bunch of incidental
| configuration, tuning, and setup.
|
| Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks,
| and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to
| have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install
| some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn
| required going through a whole bunch of red tape to
| bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it
| does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces
| application windows open (or at the very least whichever
| workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck
| user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away
| from whatever workspace _was_ on Monitor 1 because double
| fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from
| application windows that the Ever Given could do a
| goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward
| /back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so
| instead of navigating the history on the window my
| cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing
| so for some random window on an entirely different
| monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane
| screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?)
|
| I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a
| deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better
| UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average
| GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The
| bugginess and UX is _maybe_ better than (modern, non-
| LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have
| to duck when crawling under it.
|
| ----
|
| EDIT:
|
| I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I
| do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA
| shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text
| navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if
| limited in options. It'd be great if more operating
| systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda
| cool, I guess.
|
| Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS.
| It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day
| and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the
| PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference
| for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and
| worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an
| inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed.
|
| ----
|
| EDIT 2:
|
| And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that
| password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI,
| giving me no background, no dock, and no workspaces.
| Rebooted to find that no input devices worked until I
| unplugged my docking station. Background loaded briefly,
| then back to brokenness. System logs say that the dock is
| crashing due to a SIGILL. Here goes another night of
| troubleshooting macOS again instead of getting work done.
| "Just works" alright...
| zepto wrote:
| > You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means
| what you think it means.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man
|
| Being 'immune from bugs' is an obvious straw man.
|
| > A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX
|
| If by 'better UX' you mean doesn't even try to do things.
|
| > Application menus are so far away from application
| windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn
| between them with room to spare.
|
| Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for
| this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages
| Fitt's law because you don't have to be accurate in the
| vertical dimension. It's fine to have a preference for
| menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of
| that, but you are just articulating a preference here.
|
| Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS
| *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences
| and desires for it to work more like other things you
| have more familiarity with.
|
| You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just
| don't like it.
|
| I increasingly don't like it either for various reasons,
| but that doesn't mean it doesn't just work.
| yellowapple wrote:
| (As a follow up here: turns out the Dock crashing is a
| MacForge thing AFAICT, so I won't blame macOS for that
| beyond the fact that I wouldn't need MacForge at all if
| macOS supported things that even ChromeOS supports, let
| alone a "real" Linux distro. Still janky that I have to
| disconnect from my docking station to log in, though;
| that's a far cry from "just works")
| arcatech wrote:
| "It just works" never meant it was immune to bugs. No
| software is.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues
| that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's
| Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people
| saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an
| Apple dev.
|
| I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control
| both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say
| "it just works" any more.
| PpEY4fu85hkQpn wrote:
| I'm going to shock you here but every platform has
| longstanding bugs with hundreds of people complaining about
| them.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| That's kinda the point - Apple is no different from any
| other platform in this respect.
| herbst wrote:
| Not sure if i can agree. Major open source issues like
| this are usually solved at some point by some code hero.
|
| Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem
| too
| zepto wrote:
| This is an obvious straw man, parent is talking about
| 'many issues', and you are talking about major issues.
|
| Apple obviously doesn't have a lot of unfixed major
| issues. Many small complaints is another matter.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Yah, but good luck penetrating the apple forcefield.
| zepto wrote:
| > There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed,
| years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages
| where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this
| problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev.
|
| With a billion end-users this is really just noise. In any
| case this is a meaningless comparison. With Linux there is
| nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.
|
| The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it
| yourself.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Yes if you live your life exactly as Apple wants you to (plus
| some luck). Otherwise you get "you are holding it wrong"
| bugs.
| zepto wrote:
| The counterpoint is that if you don't want to use it for
| what it's designed to be used for, that's on you.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Wait, Purism actually shipped the 14?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I just went back to their site to check, and the 14 they show
| now looks different to mine. I guess there's a previous
| version that I bought back in late 2018?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yes, he should have stated, what device he used.
|
| Linux main problems with laptops are drivers and firmware. The
| best you can hope for, when replacing windows - is that it runs
| somewhat stable.
|
| But startup time, performance and batterie life will be much
| worse on standard config. And like the article said, don't
| expect resume/sleep to work consistently. Which can be very,
| very annoying and time wasting.
|
| My use case is short(or long) bursts of working with it, and
| then stopping for some time and then later resuming, expecting
| everything to be as it was, when I reopen. And I can't do this
| consistently. Which sucks. On a old Linux laptop I got
| hibernation to work (mostly) consistently so that worked, too,
| but took even longer to resume. On my previous modell, I gave
| even up, trying it to get to work.
|
| And now I just bought a HP Pavillon gaming Laptop. And I
| actually run Windows now, even though I hate windows. But I
| need to get things done. And I don't want to mess with config
| settings, probably for weeks, to bring performance at least
| close to the stock values, windows provides.
|
| Now this is not the fault of Linux, proprietary hardware
| support and optimisation are just very complicated. But it
| still sucks. And it really does not help, when certain linux
| evangelist claim to everyone, especially newcomers, everything
| is fine and much better than on windows and co. Which is just
| not true.
|
| Especially startup time annoys me. It is just painfully slow.
| And the chromebooks are showing, that it does not have to be
| that way. My cheap Asus rugged chromebook, has by far the best
| startup time/wakeup time/standby life, of all the devices I
| ever used! I open it and can immediately resume working. Just
| what I want and need. Optimized linux drivers and firmware that
| work. (And reworked procedures under the hood) Everything else
| with ChromeOS is horrible, though. Shitty software, and lacking
| applications and all tied to google.
|
| So for now I have to work with windows again, which in its
| stock config comes with so many bloatware, ads and spyware -
| that it is hard to believe people put up with this. But what
| choice do they have?
|
| I probably have to try purism at some point, but sadly with all
| my mobile linux experience so far, I expect just a expensive,
| but mediocre experience. And there does not seem to exist a
| version with a decent gpu?
| carlesfe wrote:
| I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a
| Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a
| Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".
|
| It was stated in the previous article of the series but you are
| right that it was not evident in the text.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Does it actually ship with Linux installed though?
|
| That, I think, is the main difference. I had an XPS 15" and I
| was totally unable to get any support from Dell when running
| Linux on it. I understand the XPS 13's are marketed as being
| more "Linux-friendly", but I don't know how supported they
| are.
| augusto2112 wrote:
| I have a XPS 13 as well, and it does ship with Ubuntu.
| giorgioz wrote:
| macOS has a great UX but in my personal opinion I dislike the
| native Mail app and native Calendar app. I use Gmail and to me
| Gmail is far better than the native Mail app on macOS. I also
| don't see how the author consider himself a power-user and then
| use the native Mail app which is clearly less advanced than Gmail
| which offers far more features and integrations.
| bayindirh wrote:
| As a macOS & Linux user and KDE fan (without the boy), I love
| how macOS uses space so efficiently and has great productivity
| flow.
|
| Also, the native mail & calendar apps are not that crippled
| when combined with a capable IMAP/CalDAV server combo. After
| using it for some time, I personally like how I can map it into
| my mental model and use effortlessly.
|
| I'm not a macOS power user though. I like the vanilla macOS and
| doesn't add many tools on top of that (like Brew, HammerSpoon,
| yadda yadda).
| mkl95 wrote:
| I used to work at a place where every workstation was a $5000
| Mac. I quickly found out those things are clunkier than my $600
| laptop, and way clunkier than my ancient desktop box. As a Linux
| user of many years I didn't enjoy having to deal with my
| workstation.
| ericwooley wrote:
| I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop
| machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For
| email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the
| app issues.
|
| As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near
| as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76.
|
| Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my
| laptop, and I gotta give Microsoft credit. It's been great. All
| the benefits of windows ecosystem, hardware comparability, games
| etc.... And the ability to do pretty much everything development
| wise through wsl2. The keyboard combos are similar enough in
| Linux and windows that I don't have trouble switching contexts.
| However, most of my development is still on desktop.
|
| A few years ago, I would probably have described myself as a
| never Microsofter. Maybe my passion for using as much open source
| software as possible is dying down, or maybe Microsofts push to
| embrace open source is paying off. Whichever it is, I've come
| back around to appreciating windows recently.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > but only on my desktop machine... The laptop experience is
| not anywhere near as good.
|
| That was a neat trick. You get me to read your whole post
| because I wanted to know why you didn't use Linux on your
| servers.
| Operyl wrote:
| Given the context of the article, I didn't expect him to be
| even talking about Linux Servers in his comment.
| mattwad wrote:
| Microsoft is really killing it these past couple years. I'm
| still not sure I'd recommend for a tech team over OSX. But
| mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues
| from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely
| know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.
| smoldesu wrote:
| >But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the
| issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most
| barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.
|
| If you can operate Brew, you can operate a Linux package
| manager.
| bitL wrote:
| I use Linux Mint on various laptops (mostly Zenbooks) as a
| primary OS in HiDPI mode and I am totally fine with it. You
| just need to install drivers properly and find software you
| need and then you finally feel like in control and 100% in the
| flow.
| MrMan wrote:
| Me too, several different High and very low end laptops using
| mint, mostly flawless except one issue with wifi
| ekianjo wrote:
| > All the benefits of windows ecosystem, hardware
| comparability, games etc
|
| The etc contains the integrated spying and telemetry and a
| horrible update system. A big caveat.
| bitwize wrote:
| WSL 1 was great, WSL 2 is probably even more amazing. The
| problem is it comes with a massive ball and chain called "the
| rest of Windows 10". Even ignoring all the ads, all the
| spyware, all the Windows Update shittiness... the UI is a
| confusing mess and easily beat by the likes of XFCE, Mate, or
| Plasma. Add that other stuff, and it's all just a huge pain
| that I don't want to deal with. So I don't, and I just run
| Linux desktops. They do what they're called upon to do and
| otherwise just stay put.
|
| And Windows isn't even that bad. Compared to busted up 90s
| Windows it's a dream come true. But I've been spoiled by Linux
| and my "geek privilege" of knowing how to operate it all these
| years.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true.
|
| Hard disagree. A 90's-era Windows wasn't perfect by any
| means, but Windows peaked with Windows 2000 and it's been
| downhill from there. Modern Windows - at least as Microsoft
| intends for people to use day-to-day - is an abomination, and
| I would sooner use _Windows ME_ day-to-day than any version
| of Windows 10 normally available to consumers.
|
| That said, most of that downhill has been due to bloat.
| Windows 10 LTSC _almost_ makes Windows nice enough for me to
| consider using it as my daily driver again.
| jeeeb wrote:
| Can't say I agree with this. I've been using Windows as my
| daily driver for the last decade since switching back from
| Mac+Linux for work reasons.
|
| Honestly there's lots to like in Windows 10 even if there's
| a bit of bloat around the edges. I cannot imagine wanting
| to go back to the bad old days of ME. Modern Windows is
| stable, secure, fast and has plenty in there for power
| users.
|
| Driver support and sleep mode is seamless and just works.
| Even video drivers are sandboxes in their own process.
| Windows can and I have seen it recover from video and other
| driver crashes. My laptop can switch between embedded and
| nVidia graphics seamlessly. This is a lot better than the
| situation on Linux.
|
| Integrated firewall, AV (Windows Defender), drive
| encryption (bit defender) and application signing is great
| for end users. The update process is pushy but nags less
| than I've seen on Macs and honestly you should update
| regularly.
|
| PowerShell, WSL and inbuilt virtualisation (Hyper-V) are
| great for power users. Revamped Explorer is also nice with
| options like open in PowerShell.
|
| Integration with Azure AD and SSO means that for all
| internal applications for work I don't need to sign on.
|
| My main complaints are that start menu search is still
| broken with unnecessary integration with Bing and file
| search corrupting search results with the slightest typo,
| file copy is still slow for many small files (although
| directory merging is nice) and Microsoft is a way too
| aggressive in their product placements on the start menu
| and trying to force people to create Microsoft accounts.
| rektide wrote:
| having 4 different sound control panels is a sickening
| joke. there's so many disjointed laters on layers on
| layers everywhere. nothing is ever cleaned up, just new
| glossy over layers that don't quite work as well created
| atop the old. tragi-comic experience.
| verall wrote:
| tragi-comic, hilariously terrible.
|
| You can now set a static IP either in the new network
| configuration panel or from the old adapter properties.
| If you set a static IP in one, it won't show up in the
| other. Either being set to a static IP overrides a DHCP
| setting. Who knows what happens if they are both set to
| different static IPs.
| nix23 wrote:
| Not trying to argue, but god-mode is pretty cool, made
| probably because ms-dev's had the same problem.
| [deleted]
| yellowapple wrote:
| See, all of these things would be great reasons to use
| Windows, and I agree that these are nice (though I'd
| hardly call "seamless GPU switching" unique to Windows;
| my Linux laptops can do that perfectly fine with FOSS
| drivers).
|
| The problem is that the Microsoft-sanctioned Windows
| desktop experience seems to be actively hostile to user
| experience due to all the extra shit that Microsoft has
| tacked onto the "goodness" that's Windows 10:
|
| - Cortana not only enabled by default and difficult to
| remove, but _shouting at me at max volume as my very
| first experience with a new Windows installation_
|
| - Random apps being preinstalled, even on so-called
| "professional" versions (hell, even on _enterprise_
| versions by default - and yeah, it 's trivial to disable
| these things with GPOs, but I shouldn't have to)
|
| - Literally no option to create a user account in the
| "home" edition that doesn't entail connecting to an
| online account, which is dumb as hell
|
| - Ads. On a product that I paid money for. What the fuck,
| Microsoft?
|
| Each of these things in isolation is itself entirely
| unacceptable for any product that even remotely respects
| its users. In combination, these things make Windows 10
| Home and Professional the two absolute worst versions of
| Windows money has ever been able to buy, and
| fundamentally undermine any trust I might have in
| Microsoft.
|
| I would, however, change my tune in a heartbeat if LTSC
| was at least an option, if not the default, for desktops.
| Windows 10 LTSC is what Windows 10 _should_ be, and
| probably would be if the Windows team didn 't seem driven
| to make the default Windows UX as janky as possible. I
| still think Windows 2000 was peak Windows, but LTSC is
| almost there - all the neat things you mention, and none
| of the bullshit.
|
| ----
|
| EDIT: there are also a bunch of little papercuts that bug
| me every time I use Windows, like never knowing which
| tool is the "right" one to use for various things
| (screenshots come to mind; what was wrong with the
| Snipping Tool?), or the fact that "ClearType" is anything
| but. Not that Windows 2000 didn't have its own share of
| little papercuts, but when an OS has accumulated 20 more
| years of those papercuts, they start to really add up.
|
| Also, maybe I'm just butthurt that Microsoft dropped
| Space Cadet Pinball ;)
| jeeeb wrote:
| Didn't realise Linux did seamless GPU switching these
| days. It's good to know. Personally I wish they'd move to
| proper driver isolation though.
|
| Agreed about the BS. Honestly I'd pay more money to get
| rid of it and have thought about switching back to Linux
| a few times but the day-to-day Windows 10 experience is
| smooth enough that I always end up staying (maybe I just
| have Stockholm syndrome from the downright abuse Apple
| and Google throw at their mobile users though..)
|
| ==
|
| PS: Snipping Tool is still around btw and works fine.
| Sometimes you might want to hit print screen to capture
| mouse over state though.
|
| Also as long as you don't connect to the internet you can
| skip creating an MS account on setup and Cortana won't
| bother you either afterwards either.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| I've had Windows installs (in a VM) go sideways because
| Cortana started listening DURING THE INSTALL and I was on
| a conference call.
|
| Everything is wrong with that.
| bitwize wrote:
| Microsoft has disabled Cortana during the Windows 10
| install process for recent versions -- albeit not for
| this reason. Rather, it was due to IT personnel doing
| multiple installs for corporate deployments only to be
| faced with a room full of chattering Cortanas.
|
| EDIT: It's more likely due to Microsoft decoupling
| Cortana from the OS and making it available as an app
| download. Since Cortana is not a selling point of Windows
| 10 itself it makes no sense to have it during the
| install.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| So you never updated Windows 10, not?
| christiansakai wrote:
| I finally reinstalled my Windows 10 after some time for a gaming
| PC and it was surprising to me that they are very intrusive.
| Like, I have to create a Microsoft account? And they have other
| sorts of update that happened randomly. Can we trust Microsoft?
| lhl wrote:
| To preface, I think all of the author's complaints are pretty
| valid. I spent 15 years primarily on Mac laptops/desktops and
| finally switched in 2015 after a few years of being less and less
| happy with the direction both the hardware and OS was taking, and
| it was definitely a rough transition even having years and years
| of UNIX/LINUX experience and using "perfectly" compatible
| hardware (I started with a Thinkpad X250 and started with an
| Ubuntu default DE before ditching it pretty quickly for a custom
| Arch/Openbox setup that I've been yak-shaving since). There are
| still quirks (sleep/suspend, bluetooth, multi-display, DPI and
| color adjustment) that make it far less dependable than using a
| Mac, but on the flip side, I feel like I've had much superior (if
| more complex) customizability, and in general, less
| unsolvable/nasty surprises when upgrading. I still have some Mac
| testing machines and it seems like MacOS has continued to get
| buggier and less power-user friendly with every update.
|
| Also, for my needs, luckily I was a lot less dependent on PIM
| features, and much more so for dev tools, so it was a better fit
| for my needs overall. WINE (and virtualization) has been a huge
| thing for bridging some of the missing pieces as well.
|
| While the edges have been rougher, one other big advantage for me
| has been the much wider hardware selection - over the past few
| years I've switched from Thinkpads, to Chromebooks, to gaming
| laptops w/ beefy CUDA support, and now to a 8C16T Mobile Ryzen
| laptop with 64GB of RAM w/ 12h+ battery life that's almost as
| fast as my desktop workstation.
| Labo333 wrote:
| What is your "8C16T Mobile Ryzen laptop"? 12+ battery life
| sounds really promising!!!
| lhl wrote:
| It's a Mechrevo Code 01 (TongFang PF5NU1G). It's sold by a
| number of OEMs including w/ Linux pre-installed as the KDE
| Slimbook, Tuxedo Pulse and others. Actually, I linked to
| almost all of the various OEM releases along with a detailed
| review from when I got mine last summer:
| https://www.notion.so/lhl/Mechrevo-Code-01-TongFang-
| PF5NU1G-...
|
| Note, pretty soon, 5800H and 5800U laptops should be
| available. The new CPU should perform even better (Zen 3
| based vs Zen 2) and in general seem there seem to be more
| premium builds coming. USB-C DP and 2.5K displays would be
| the big things I'd be looking for if I were shopping this
| year. Personally, I'm ok w/ waiting for for next gen though
| (USB 4.0).
| Labo333 wrote:
| Thanks!
| jonseager wrote:
| I think this all has to do with your intended use case. I've been
| a full time Linux desktop user for ~10 years now, and I
| completely agree that the PIM/email/calendar apps need a lot of
| work to compete with the standard macOS apps.
|
| Interesting many macOS users default to Gnome-based distros for
| the familiar paradigm, but I've had a lot of success recommending
| Plasma to such users. It's not as pretty, but it is very stable
| and has a lot of the same default/built in functionality in the
| K* apps that Mac users usually expect. Doesn't stop me
| periodically getting dragged back to Gnome, mind you...
|
| I've used it on a bunch of different hardware and rarely had
| issues with screen tearing or 'needing to tweak' to make things
| work. And I truly cannot find a better alternative for most dev
| workflows.
|
| It's swings and roundabouts. I settle for using the web
| Gmail/Calendar experience in exchange for the other benefits it
| brings to my work
| sudhirkhanger wrote:
| I have been an Linux and open source software user for over a
| decade. I will be getting a Mac from work and it feels weird to
| jump on the proprietary bandwagon.
|
| That being said one can get used to most of the complainants
| about the app space. But system continues to have problems with
| hibernation/resume and memory management. App updates, critical,
| and system updates should be separated. If one opens a large apps
| then slowly the system load will increase to a level which will
| render the system unusable.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| I agree with the article in that the Apple hardware is superior.
| The best laptops available for Linux are the Dell XPSs and they
| are not in the same league as the Mac (I have both). However, for
| developers, especially system software developers, Linux is a far
| better choice in terms of software. Everything is scriptable,
| tools and libraries are typically built first for Linux and then
| ported over, you get enormous customizability for your workflow.
| Its not even close.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close.
|
| That's astounding. Finder must be awful.
|
| To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file
| manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close
| second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in
| general.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Personally I find Nautilus much more irritating than Finder has
| ever been. Finder has most of the features most people need,
| you just need to know where to look for them, but Nautlius just
| straight up cuts stuff out.
|
| Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar
| (XFCE) are decent though.
|
| Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office"
| syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its
| functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to
| dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my
| case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Like what? Be specific
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac
| recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute
| anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago.
|
| Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps
| there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting
| said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to
| constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me,
| instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and
| "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could
| type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search
| was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless.
|
| After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and
| used the terminal for all file operations.
| szhu wrote:
| I get what you mean, and I have the same complaints about the
| defaults. Here are some useful shortcuts to know, especially
| when fixing issues:
|
| - View > Go to Folder... (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to
| go to.
|
| - Cmd-Up takes you one level up.
|
| - Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the
| title bar to see the location of the current folder. This
| works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not
| just Finder!
|
| - Cmd-Shift-. to temporarily show hidden files.
|
| And here are some settings I recommend that turn Finder into
| a very pleasant experience for someone coming from Linux. I
| always set these as soon as I get a new account:
|
| - View > as Columns (You might need to set this a few times
| for different initial folders.)
|
| - View > Show Path Bar
|
| - Preferences > General: New Finder windows show (home
| folder)
|
| - Preferences > Sidebar > Favorites: Make sure (home folder)
| is checked. I'd actually recommend unchecking every other
| item in this group (except for Airdrop if you need it). Why:
| Having less sidebar items makes Column View work better
| because, when opening a folder in Column View, the sidebar
| item that's the closest ancestor is shown as the leftmost
| column.
|
| - Preferences > Sidebar > Locations: Make sure "Hard disks"
| is completely checked. By default, the / disk is hidden from
| the sidebar.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| If you want Finder to show dot files and system
| directories:
|
| defaults write com.apple.finder ShowAllFiles 1
|
| Also note that shortcuts like [?]| G also work in standard
| open/save dialogs.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future:
|
| - You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View >
| Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and
| files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the
| title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too)
|
| - You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to
| Folder... or Command-Shift-G
|
| - Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with
| Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs)
|
| Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is
| capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you're ever
| looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good
| place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom
| frequently but that's nothing new.
| jshier wrote:
| Documents and Downloads are the actual directories on disk,
| they're not some sort of abstraction. It's pretty simple.
| /Users/<user>/Documents, /Users/<user>/Downloads, etc.
| brightball wrote:
| Anytime I tell people that I switched from Mac to Linux I let
| them know that it's not for everybody. I'm happy with my
| decision, but I did it for the hardware and there are enough
| quirks that I wouldn't recommend it for anybody who wasn't really
| committed to the move.
|
| Everything in this article is true. I tend to mute the desktop
| notifications for several noisy applications. I use mail web apps
| directly rather than using the desktop clients but I am really
| encouraged by the future of Thunderbird and do plan to switch one
| day in the future.
|
| In this field, I learn from the quirks though. I use Ansible to
| manage my laptop configuration and it teaches me a lot about
| Linux under the hood that I never would have learned otherwise.
|
| When I need docker, I like having a native linux experience.
|
| Ultimately, there's nothing I need that I can't do and I can buy
| hardware that I'm in complete control of (upgrades, etc) which is
| important to me.
|
| Software wise, I do miss Preview and OmniGraffle. Other than
| that, I'm not missing much.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| > When I need docker, I like having a native linux experience.
|
| This is a severely underrated point. If you're not running
| docker on a linux host, you are running it on a VM and getting
| all the performance tradeoffs you would get with developing on
| a VM. There seems to be a lot of developers that are unaware of
| this.
| brightball wrote:
| Ironically, this was one of the main reasons for my initial
| switch and then I went 3 years without using Docker.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Tell that to Icaza: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668789
| kelnos wrote:
| The thing that always bothered me about de Icaza is that he
| should know better, given his credentials and how immersed he'd
| been in the FOSS scene for so long.
|
| He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz
| calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model.
| Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline
| and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software,
| and instead just want to refine their designs, throw things
| away, start over from scratch, and make things perfect.
|
| I don't disagree with this view, and I think it's just somewhat
| silly to expect the same level of polish and back-compat on
| Linux that you'd see on a commercial OS with commercial apps.
| Certainly there is a lot of very polished software built under
| the OSS model (though many of that software has funded full-
| time developers working on it), but any project that is either
| run largely by volunteers, or largely by the programmers
| themselves, is often not going to end up like a polished,
| seamless, corporate product. Companies (and product managers)
| make decisions about building software in a very different way
| than developers do. They have different priorities, and
| different things they care about.
|
| There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", because
| FOSS Linux-based OSes are constantly-moving targets run by
| people who generally aren't getting paid to do the work
| necessary for that to happen. That's pretty much always been
| the case, and even with all the corporate interest around Linux
| (Canonical comes to mind), it's just not happening.
|
| My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 4 back in 1997
| or so, though I didn't start using Linux as my daily driver
| until 2002 or so. It has always had, and will always have, many
| rough edges. For me, I find that I have fewer problems with it
| than I did during my stints running macOS, but... that's just
| me, and I can fix nearly any issue I run into (even if they are
| few and far between) with a minimum of effort and time. That's
| not for everyone, and that's fine.
|
| [0] Don't click (copy/paste into a new tab), as jwz has a nasty
| redirect for people coming from HN, but:
| https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
| lupire wrote:
| If you don't want clicks, don't put the https:// in the
| comment.
| sergeykish wrote:
| [2012].
|
| A lot has changed, Apple braking compatibility, Microsoft
| braking so much. Microsoft hegemony on desktop destroyed by
| web, smartphones and Apple, so much that ChromeOS exists. No
| Flash, no IE, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium. Windows
| adopted Linux with WSL. Wine getting better, Valve Proton
| drives gaming on Linux. Open source AMD GPU driver. Wayland.
| The future is awesome.
|
| He thought of stomping alternatives, parroting Jobs, that's
| wrong. The reason I've switched to Linux is such attitude
| from Microsoft. Linux experience is a moving target. At first
| we are expats, striving to replicate what was lost, but Linux
| provides much more. Why not explore it?
|
| Microsoft Windows is powered by legacy, enterprise and
| gaming. Apple macOS advertises polished experience, creative
| applications, iOS development. Google Android, Apple iOS --
| touch oriented OS, app store. Google Chromebook -- security
| and web. Linux is different, every community strives to find
| its own answer.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I estimate that by the middle of this decade, linux will no
| longer be a moving target for third parties. It is just
| getting complex, mature and polished enough to keep
| continuously changing. It will likely be good enough for most
| things most people would like to do.
|
| Nevertheless, I don't think that will make its market in
| increase significantly. There are more factors that influence
| the success on the desktop beyond polish, maturity and
| technical excellence. Even listening what industry say they
| need is a good indicator of what needs to be done. The "third
| party software industry" is like steve jobs said about users:
| "we can't just ask for what customers want".
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| For me, ubuntu is hands down better than mac.
|
| - Finder is a disaster
|
| - LibreOffice on mac works far worse
|
| - General aestetics is very unfortunate (ymmv)
|
| But macOS has that one killer application for me that makes it
| worth suffering all of this: Sketch.
| dbspin wrote:
| Finder is certainly less visually appealing since it became
| monochrome, but a disaster? Its preview tools are excellent. It
| provides tabbed view, which is bizarrely still not available in
| Windows explorer. It's excellent at remembering the state of
| folders, and which information was previously available in
| columns. It works well across different sized screens. Not a
| huge fan of the look and feel of Big Sur in general, but moving
| back to MacOs recently after using windows of a couple of
| years, finder is a wonderful breath of fresh air.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| For one thing, it is extremely _slow_. Every time open file
| meny appears, or need to search for something, prepare to
| wait 15-30 seconds. File management is a pain, renaming,
| viewing properties, etc are likely the worst of all file
| managers I 've ever seen. Nautilus is so much better (but it
| changed for the worse since 2008, too).
|
| (I'd prefer a Far Manager version for linux / iOS to manage
| files, but I have accepted that this will never happen,
| unfortunately)
| sbuk wrote:
| How is renaming poor? You can batch rename and a simple
| click on the file name allows for renaming. Last time I
| used Nautilus, you still had to activate file renaming with
| a keypress or from a menu and that had to be done in a moat
| window. Viewing properties in Finder is easily done with
| cmd-i or viewable in column mode.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > You can batch rename and a simple click on the file
| name allows for renaming.
|
| Exactly! So every time I double-click a bit slower than
| macOS wants me to, it enters the renaming mode. I rarely
| need to rename files, and since the name should be
| entered via keyboard anyway, a special hotkey makes way
| more sense.
|
| Also, not showing file extensions by default is a big
| problem. And it is generally EXTREMELY SLOW, I shrug
| every time I have to launch the damn thing.
| sbuk wrote:
| Personally, I find that counter-intuitive in a WIMP UI.
| If it keeps happening, you can change your double-click
| speed in System Preferences - shortcut key is Enter
| (which has been the shortcut since before Windows or
| Gnome/KDE existed). File extensions have always been
| hidden by default. Again, on a WIMP based UI, they're
| kind of superfluous. Finder is super snappy form me.
| Literally just launched it and it's there straight away.
| Obviously YMMV...
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| To be fair, I'd never use a gnome distro. Basic things are
| plugins now, because 1% market share says "be super weird and
| experimental"
|
| I switched my x220 to kubuntu after windows 19.09 support ended
| and it's been fine. Random things like printing don't work, but
| nothing I need daily.
| dgan wrote:
| I work with a colleague who uses a mac while almost the whole
| company uses linux. The number of times he complained something
| doesn't work (like using curl? Or running some python? I don't
| know i never had a mac) when it clearly does, is amazing.
|
| So i guess you trade one type of annoyance for another
|
| Personnally been using Linux for 5 years everyday now
| fortran77 wrote:
| Windows 10 + WSL would have been a better thing to switch to.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| The first and main mistake any OS switchers do, regardless from
| where they come and to which OS they go is the fact that they
| expect the new OS to provide the same experience like the one
| they come from. Switching from Windows to Linux, people expect
| great GUI and hand holding. Switching from Linux to Windows,
| people expect a lot of customization and are annoyed by hand
| holding Microsoft does. Switching from Mac to Windows, people
| expect the Apple's way of hand holding, which is done differently
| by Microsoft and thus is annoying.
|
| Before doing such a drastic move maybe do a parallel of your most
| menial everyday task on both OS'es and then decide how to move
| about on the new OS regarding that. Also read about the
| philosophy behind each OS and understand it's strengths and
| weaknesses. Only after that you can complete and/or adjust to
| this switch.
|
| As an example, I was first a Windows user. Then I started to go
| about with Linux. And I loved the style of pipe one program to
| next to complete a task using nothing but bash/batch (whatever
| terminology you prefer). This was before Windows implemented same
| using PowerShell, hence why I love and use to this very day
| CygWin. On many of my customers systems CygWin is installed and
| used for production.
|
| The article's author mistake is exactly this lack of adjusting
| and instead trying to force Mac style on Linux. My 2 cents.
| perfopt wrote:
| Read up to the point he said the app he missed most was
| Mail.app!!! Ha ha ha. As a long time Mac and iOS user I dont use
| the mail apps on either platform. IMP its pretty badly done.
| peferron wrote:
| I use a Mac laptop for leisure and a Linux desktop for work. I'm
| very happy with both. Switching their roles would be miserable:
| Linux laptops can't compete on trackpad and battery life, and
| Macs can't compete on perf especially if you need more than 16 GB
| of RAM. Macs also don't have i3, but that's subjective.
| blunte wrote:
| Preview is one of the most underrated pieces of software in the
| world today.
|
| I make the assumption that Quicklook uses Preview (because surely
| it must).
|
| Being able to hit spacebar on just about any kind of selected
| document/image type file and see a near instant look, multiple
| pages and all, is so important. Once you don't have that (move to
| the Windows world), you realize how much you miss it. And you
| can, with a small bit of effort, add capabilities for additional
| files such as Markdown.
|
| Being able to open a PDF or image in a fast, reliable native
| viewer, and even do some level of editing (such as quickly adding
| a signature!) is super useful.
|
| In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some
| distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop,
| things would stop working after a short while. Meanwhile, I have
| lived on my 2014 MBP since 2014, going through multiple OS
| upgrades in place - no wipes/reinstalls - and find it just as
| performant as ever. It is in most use cases more performant than
| my 2017 _much_ higher spec Dell XPS 15 (in Windows or Linux boot
| mode).
|
| There are still some things I hate, #1 being that when I cmd-tab
| to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window.
| What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you
| don't make its window visible!? This I have never understood. But
| generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any
| alternative.
| oreille wrote:
| > when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't
| raise that window
|
| Hold the option key while releasing cmd, it will raise the
| minimized window.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > when I cmd-tab to a window
|
| There's no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which
| can have many or no windows. The different mental model is
| probably the reason for your frustration.
| blunte wrote:
| Tomato Tomato. As another person clarified, I'm probably
| trying to switch to the most recent window of a given
| application. For all practical purposes, the window and the
| application are the same thing. There may be additional
| windows of that app, but they are all that app.
| ericmay wrote:
| Eh I think the model they implemented makes sense. You are
| confusing the window of an application with the application
| itself.
|
| Cmd + Tab switches between applications, or windows. If you
| had multiple windows of an application like Safari open but
| minimized to the dock, maybe you are switching to Safari
| the application and then opening a new window? I believe
| there is a command that actually pulls up the windows
| individually as well? Maybe CMD + 1 or something similar?
|
| Personally I think this route is the most intuitive and
| makes the most sense to me, but I can empathize with your
| frustration. Kind of related but I generally feel annoyed
| whenever I use Windows for anything. It's very unintuitive
| for me.
| giovani wrote:
| On my keyboard its CMD + ` by default, but I guess you
| can probably change it somewhere.
| spfzero wrote:
| Yep, it's cmd-`. I use the heck out of that when I have
| multiple spreadsheet windows open, or even an in-progress
| email window or two.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > For all practical purposes, the window and the
| application are the same thing
|
| Not at all. That's a very unique thing about the Mac that
| trips Windows people. It's a subtle but crucial difference,
| unless you grasp it, you'll always be a bit lost on the
| Mac, as I am when I use Windows.
|
| On the Mac, for instance, Photoshop can be frontmost and
| have no windows, panels, while you're seeing your whole
| desktop. The only hint you have is the menu on the top
| left. Photoshop on Windows covers your whole screen all the
| time when it's frontmost. If you think that's tomato
| tomato, you haven't understood the difference.
| curun1r wrote:
| Not built in, but: https://manytricks.com/witch/
|
| Gives you the best of both worlds.
| themadsens wrote:
| You may want HyperDock[1] which enables that behaviour. There
| is also HyperSwitch[2] which switches windows, not apps. It's a
| beta, but still works great on Big Sur.
|
| [1] https://bahoom.com/hyperdock
|
| [2] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch
| HowardStark wrote:
| Command + Backtick was a pretty big game changer to switch
| between windows. I understand the difference between that and
| Hyperswitch, but I've rarely been truly wanting for something
| much more than Cmd+`
| usaphp wrote:
| > What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if
| you don't make its window visible!?
|
| What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and
| you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window
| everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.
| mromanuk wrote:
| And if you want to open the minimized or hidden window, after
| cmd-tab, do a option-cmd-tab and finally release cmd-tab. The
| window will get focus
| blunte wrote:
| What is the more common case: a user switches to a hidden
| app and then does NOT want to actually see a window from
| that app, or the user switches to an app and wants to see
| it.
|
| I don't need to do research to answer this question. If a
| user switches to an app, it's because they want to use that
| app. And using most apps depends heavily on being able to
| see them.
|
| If I want to control things without a UI, I'll go to
| terminal.
| mromanuk wrote:
| It really shine in this use case: Because only he app
| menu is visible, sometimes, you can open|create a file
| without cluttering your desktop. It's ok for document
| based apps
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I agree w you in principle, but the minor ergonomic
| friction -- adding the option key to alt-tab to restore
| and focus a minimized window -- is not a big deal to me.
| That said, I never got in the habit of minimizing windows
| (partly bc I didn't know about the keyboard-only way to
| restore them), so it's a non-issue for me.
| [deleted]
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Just take me to most recent non-minimized window of that app.
| And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I
| want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the
| most recent window unminimized. This isn't rocket science.
| toxik wrote:
| I think there's a setting for this behavior, or there used
| to be at least.
|
| Edit ah. no it's when you click the app icon in the dock. I
| guess that's the behavior sought here?
| mistersquid wrote:
| > And if there is no such window left, and I told system
| that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I
| want the most recent window unminimized.
|
| If one is screensharing or presenting to an audience and
| the only windows in the target app are minimized but
| contain sensitive information, one most certainly would not
| want one of those minimized windows to reveal.
|
| As a sibling to your comment points out, the solution is to
| hold the option key down while releasing the command key.
| This verifies a user's intention to reveal the first-
| minimized window.
| barrkel wrote:
| Alt-tabbing in the middle of a presentation risks
| displaying random information no matter what. You could
| tab to browser showing mail, or to Slack, or a PDF viewer
| showing your latest payslip, or whatever. If you have
| sensitive information or something which might show
| alerts in the middle of an important presentation, you
| should probably close such apps and / or mute their
| notifications.
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Alt-tabbing in the middle of a presentation risks
| displaying random information no matter what.
|
| When presenting, I keep close track of what information I
| have minimized and unminimized.
|
| It would severely hamper my work (all of which is
| disclosed) to quit apps that have minimized windows with
| information I do not want to show to undisclosed parties.
|
| To be clear, command-tabbing on macOS may not behave the
| same "Alt-tabbing" on other platforms (I honestly don't
| know). Specifically, command-tabbing does not give focus
| to apps that are hidden until they are selected and does
| not reveal minimized windows without user intervention
| (holding option down while releasing command.)
|
| Automatically disclosing minimized windows for command-
| tabbed apps that have no disclosed windows would actually
| remove a privacy feature rather than enhancing command-
| tab app switching.
| blunte wrote:
| This exactly.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| About your cmd-tab point, macOS in its distant past made an
| architectural choice to decouple the running application from
| the windows presenting it (I think this goes the whole way back
| to nextstep).
|
| So while cmd-tab does give the application focus (as you'll see
| reflected in the menu bar) it won't bring up the window.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Similar experiences (eg w my 2012 mpb15r).
|
| You'll be happy to learn that your "#1 hate" is easily
| resolved: cmd-tab then hold option key down while releasing
| cmd-tab. Voila, the minimized window is restored with focus. :)
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Whenever I'm doing something in MacOS and the option / action
| I was hoping to find isn't there, I try the same but with
| Option held down.
|
| The philosophy seems to be that the UI is kept clean and easy
| to understand but the power is always there if you need it.
| bengale wrote:
| This is always one of my top tips for power users moving
| over to macOS.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Somebody needs to make a bot/AI that regularly posts semi-
| contentiously titled articles like the above because they
| spawn some of the best discussion threads on HN, I learn
| something new (or try something new) every time.. Thanks for
| the 'option-tab' trick!
| mrtksn wrote:
| Windows users who switch to macOS will complain that their new
| shiny and expensive machine won't let them to go through their
| photos in a folder using the arrow keys and they have to open
| the photos one by one. Then you tell them to hit the space when
| a photo is selected, they first look at the keyboard then at
| the screen and they are like "O.K. that will work", you proceed
| to tell them to try it on a PDF or something else and that's
| the moment they recognise the value that they paid for :)
| blunte wrote:
| I may be missing something, but aren't you describing
| Finder's Gallery View? In that mode, you can left/right arrow
| your way through the entire set of files in a folder, viewing
| each one (image or pdf or whatever).
| mrtksn wrote:
| Gallery view is pretty new and still needs to be
| discovered. Also not very convenient just for quickly
| viewing bunch of files. The view of the folder changes
| completely, so you get disoriented and if it's a large
| folder you will need t skim through one line of folders to
| find what you are looking for. It's good for certain use
| cases but it doesn't help with quickly going through some
| files in a large folder.
|
| On Windows, when you open a photo by clicking it, you can
| go to the next/prev one using the arrow keys and on macOS
| you can't do that. So the Windows immigrants get annoyed,
| naturally.
|
| On Mac, you can simply select a single file anywhere and
| hitting pace will very quickly show you the contents, hit
| space again and you are back to the folder. You can use the
| arrow keys to skim around and the file contents will be
| quickly displayed. If you first select a bunch of files and
| then hit space, it will loop though your selection when you
| use the arrow keys.
|
| It's a very convenient feature to skim through the files in
| a folder.
| iwebdevfromhome wrote:
| Well damn, I've been a mac user for 6 years now and this is
| the first time I hear about this option haha and it was one
| of my main complains
| KMnO4 wrote:
| For me, that moment was uninstalling an app.
|
| I had to Google it.
|
| "Drag the app to the trash bin."
|
| Remember how hard it is to uninstall stuff on Windows?
| Especially if you're doing more than one?
| botverse wrote:
| I'm a Linux and Mac OS user myself and I'm sorry to say
| it's never as easy as that, there is a lot left behind and
| very difficult to know what exactly to clean up if you
| built and install yourself
| rz2k wrote:
| Some settings can be left behind, but AppCleaner[1] will
| find them.
|
| [1] https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| Preview is a great program, but unfortunately when I upgraded
| from Mavericks to High Sierra on my 2012 Macbook Pro, I started
| to notice that Preview rendering is now _blurry_. And I never
| figured out how to fix it -- nothing I found online worked.
| What a bummer.
|
| xpdf satisfies most of my PDF reading needs now instead. It has
| tabs too, which is handy.
|
| The change to High Sierra also broke some nice iTunes behavior
| I had been exploiting previously that let me connect to my home
| iTunes share over a VPN connection. Ah well.
| aloer wrote:
| Quicklook is such an amazing feature and it seems so basic that
| I just don't get why windows hasn't added anything like that.
| Are there patents on this?
|
| Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a
| file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it's the
| correct one.
|
| I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial
| amount of accidental information leak across the entire world
| :)
| curun1r wrote:
| The magic of quicklook isn't really about the behavior in
| Finder, though. The magic of it is that it's available as an
| API to developers. I use an app that is ostensibly marketed
| as an image viewer but, because it uses quicklook to render
| file content, it can open all the file types that quicklook
| supports.
|
| Being able to use an image viewer to cycle files in a zip
| archive (without extracting them) and be able to render
| anything from images to spreadsheets to pdf files is pretty
| remarkable.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat
| Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs.
| If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing
| something akin to a system application like Windows and
| Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate
| the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as
| much.
| 2ion wrote:
| It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media
| and document management. No thumbnails for random media /
| file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata
| may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no
| sensible use of them except in the details view of
| "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in
| Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we
| don't support CalDAV. Email? Well we have IMAP support but
| it's a footnote. Contacts? God help you, we want you to use
| Outlook and Outlook only.
| toyg wrote:
| Microsoft had to walk a tight rope, historically, for
| fear of antitrust action. If they had improved Windows
| too much, big developers would have gone ballistic and
| dragged them in the courts again. Apple never had to care
| about this, and it shows.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| You are being downvoted but I think you are onto
| something.
| sbuk wrote:
| Preview has been there from the very early days of NeXT and
| Display PostScript (NeXT worked on DPS with Adobe). Apple's
| pdf handling has always been baked in as Quartz is 'pdf
| based'.
| tomp wrote:
| You can easily enable this in Windows.
|
| In Explorer, just go to the View tab/menu, enable _Preview
| Sidebar_ , click on the image, resize the Preview Sidebar as
| necessary, look at the image, then disable _Preview Sidebar_
| again.
|
| Easy /s
| blunte wrote:
| Windows Explorer Preview is just not the same. It's either
| always on or always off, and it takes up space, and it does
| not pop up above other content.
|
| Quicklook is there only when you want it; it pops up a good
| sized window on top of anything else, and it goes away just
| as quickly and easily as you brought it up - spacebar.
| Hiopl wrote:
| This exists for Windows though as a third-party application,
| which points to one of the reasons why Windows is great.
| There's great software for nearly anything you could think of.
| It's one of the main things I miss when I use Linux. The
| usability/functionality in the applications simply isn't there
| and it will never be there, for whatever reason.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The PDF editing and signature workflow is so good that I never
| print out PDFs to sign and scan them in any more.
| blunte wrote:
| It's so good, so fast, and so easy, (and so obviously
| useful), I just cannot fathom why Windows doesn't have a
| comparable answer for this.
| epse wrote:
| Antitrust lawsuit from Adobe maybe?
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| I had a Linux IdeaPad p400 for like 12 years with Ubuntu. 0
| issues. I now have a system 76 gazelle. No problems.
|
| Ubuntu 20.04 is really easy to use.
|
| I can't stand the mbp. Hoops to jump through for everything
| with a cli. Extra permissions to make build tools work. Extra
| additions to file permissions that are incompatible with
| docker. Special gui with extra settings to make docker work.
| vpns that have to run inside the top bar and freeze up with no
| way to get them to shut down. Weirdness with .net core
| compilations. User admin only with a gui. Difficulty finding
| files because the finder window doesn't follow path. Extra
| steps to launch apps from the cli. Weird ppi so text settings
| that are legible everywhere else aren't in Mac. Slow keyboard
| repeat rates that are hard to change.
| toyg wrote:
| It's amazing to me how Docker became the devops tool of
| choice, when its experience on Mac and Windows was just so
| horrible for so long.
|
| Linux users have more power than they realize, in certain
| sectors.
| oplav wrote:
| I switched from Windows to OS X over 7 years ago and this is
| the first time I've ever learned about Quicklook. Looks like a
| great feature.
| cmehdy wrote:
| If you know about brew you can also find a bunch of extra
| quicklook plugins: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-
| look-plugins
|
| Works on and off for some things (video previews for example)
| but overall worth a quick "brew install" in my opinion.
| technosmurf wrote:
| Yeah, that repository's README is a little bit outdated.
|
| Here's what I found works or is broken in macOS Catalina
| and above:
|
| Works: -------------------- # Preview
| source code files with syntax highlighting (like colored
| .JS files) brew install qlcolorcode #
| Preview Markdown files brew install qlstephen
| # Preview JSON files with syntax highlighting brew
| install quicklook-json # Preview plaintext
| files with unknown extensions, like README, CHANGELOG, etc.
| brew install qlstephen # Preview the content of
| .IPA files # Installs inside /Applications folder
| brew install suspicious-package # Preview
| iOS/macOS provisioning information for .ipa and .xcarchive
| # For 'mobileprovision' files, Xcode has Quick Look plugin
| collision: #
| https://github.com/ealeksandrov/ProvisionQL/issues/20
| brew install provisionql # Preview the content
| of macOS apps # Installs inside /Applications folder
| brew install apparency # Preview WebP images
| brew install webpquicklook
|
| Broken: -------------------- # Display
| image size and resolution in windo titlebar of Quick Look
| # Doesn't work due to API change from Apple # https:/
| /github.com/Nyx0uf/qlImageSize/issues/45#issuecomment-61085
| 2166 #brew install qlimagesize #
| Preview Adobe ASE color swatch files from Photoshop,
| Illustrator # Doesn't work in macOS Catalina
| #brew install quicklookase # Preview the
| content of Android .APK files # Doesn't work in macOS
| Catalina #brew install quicklookapk
|
| As listed in the README, you also need to unset the
| quarantine attribute. To see the changes, you need to
| restart the Quick Look Server after the install, and
| sometimes requires logging out and in again. Here's a
| script I made, let me know if it works for you:
|
| https://github.com/spiritphyz/Save-the-
| Environment/blob/main...
| specialist wrote:
| CSV, markdown, plaintext, and JSON plugins are must-haves
| for office work.
|
| BetterZip's plugin is okay.
|
| Even better would be:
|
| I'd sacrifice my first born child for a "Show Package
| Contents" option supporting zip, webarchive, and other
| common composite files.
|
| (Using Finder: highlight file with .app or .dmg extension,
| right-click to show context menu, chose "Show Package
| Contents", opens new tab with selected file as "mount"
| point. I'd really like to know how Finder "mounts"
| composite files without using fuse file system thingie.
| Then maybe we could write plugins.)
| eyesee wrote:
| Because they're not really "composite files", they're
| packages. It's just a normal directory with a bit set to
| treat it as a file in context (also driven by file
| extension). "Show Package Contents" just opens a Finder
| window rooted within the package. From CLI you'll see
| them as a directory.
| specialist wrote:
| Aha. Feeling dumb that I didn't know that. Of course
| they're directories with some metadata. Duh.
|
| I always kinda guessed that DMGs were something like a
| ZIP file. Well, not really:
|
| _" 3. Mounting DMGs
|
| DMGs can be mounted, just like any other file system,
| though technically this is what is known as a "loopback"
| mount (i.e. a mount backed by a local file, rather than a
| device file)"_
|
| http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html
|
| Pretty cool. Thanks for the tip.
|
| Now wondering about differences between loopback mount,
| FUSE, potential for seamless Finder UX integration...
| bArray wrote:
| Essentially the article boils down to "I am used to a Mac and
| anything that doesn't behave like a Mac is incorrect, and I'm
| unwilling to invest time into figuring it out". It's fair enough
| stance, but unless you are willing to invest time into becoming a
| Linux 'power user', you're going to remain locked into whatever
| hardware Apple happens to be peddling at the time.
|
| The M1 seems great today, but Apple will slump again in the
| future and there will be yet another blog about how a Mac user
| tried Linux and found out it's different. With Linux I'm pretty
| free to move about different hardware platforms and pick whatever
| is out there that suites my needs. This ranges from desktops, to
| laptops, to tablets, and now even phones. The Linux 'ecosystem'
| looks more compelling every day, _especially_ for power users.
|
| For those looking to transition, I would recommend doing so by
| running something like Ubuntu in a VM on your Mac and slowly
| transition your workflow. You'll find that in some areas your
| workflow will be significantly better and after some
| experimenting you'll find the right tools for you.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment.
|
| If anyone realizes that all they are mostly doing is using,
| let's say, a browser, IDE and terminal for most tasks and some
| tooling that can be used anywhere, the value proposition for
| macOS (or Windows for that matter) is much lower. My last Mac I
| stopped using in ~2016 because I made that realization myself.
| Even if my hardware is not to the standard of Apple's hardware,
| the only thing it should do is not fail randomly on work-
| critical devices. That doesn't happen at all to me - Ubuntu on
| the ThinkPads I use work great.
| cpach wrote:
| What it all boils down to is a matter of taste, IMO.
|
| In the 90s there used to be big differences. E.g. Apple had
| their own network protocols and so on. It was harder to use
| FOSS software on a Windows 98 system etc.
|
| These days, both Linux and macOS are Unix/Unix-like. Windows 10
| has WSL. They can all run Chrome, Firefox, Visual Studio Code,
| Emacs, vi, Sublime Text, bash, git, grep, etc etc.
|
| So whatever you choose you can probably find a way to configure
| a reasonable system. Some details differ, but in many parts
| they are all alike.
| carlosrg wrote:
| >Essentially the article boils down to "I am used to a Mac and
| anything that doesn't behave like a Mac is incorrect, and I'm
| unwilling to invest time into figuring it out".
|
| It doesn't look like that. He has legitimate issues with things
| he needs for his job, like a good email client and calendar
| client. No matter how you try to adapt your workflow, the PIM
| situation in Linux is very poor.
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