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Comment by willcodeforfoo | Hacker News Reader

Hardware aside, does anyone who was used to OS X and its app ecosystem's polish really find Linux or Windows that much better? I'd miss Photoshop, Lightroom, Sequel Pro, iTerm 2, Homebrew, Sketch, Transmit, Alfred, Reeder, Keynote, Airmail, Spotify... just to name a few.

Not to mention every other OS I've used has varying HiDPI support and typography really looks best on OS X.

I wonder if some design-minded Linux geeks will rally around making Linux on the desktop a polished enough experience to rival OS X?

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I used a Linux desktop (Ubuntu, specifically) for a few months at work this year, but ended up switching back to OS X. The number of basic, table-stakes stuff that was still utterly broken in day-to-day usage was astounding.

(Since someone will inevitably ask, because they personally never have any issues: off the top of my head: the barely-adequate Alfred replacement forgot its keybinding on the daily. Unity's hotcorners would stop working randomly until I cleared and reset them in the prefs. Mouse acceleration was a disaster on my bluetooth trackpad so I wrote a bunch of calls to the synaptics command line util to reset it to something close to reasonable -- but it would randomly reset and I'd have to re-run the script. HiDPI support is a random mess of things working well or appallingly depending on author, toolkit, time of day, and orientation of the sun. The typography situation is awful -- every third person will point you at a different guide to "fixing" it, but they just result in different kinds of awful. The GUI would hard-lock occasionally and no amount of keyboard poking would get me to a TTY I could reboot from -- seemed to be something Systemd was doing. Getting simple system logs is cryptic bullshit thanks to Systemd's binary mess now, naturally. Etc, etc. I could go on for days.)

I wish there was a systemd free desktop Linux...

There are. If that was my only issue, I'd happily have put up with Gentoo's compile times.

Gentoo has full support for binary packages if compiling irritates you.

Given that systemd is the latest iteration of the freedesktop kits (powerkit/powerd now talks to logind to do suspend and hibernate), it will be increasingly hard to do if one want to use any of the major DEs or their relevant toolkits.

> Systemd's binary mess now

On the contrary, Systemd has brought a standard, a replacement for messy scripts and logs used before.

Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Gnome itself is shitty thing in my opinion, KDE is too complex, XFCE is nice.

A standard has a specification.

I made my point, with some arguments, I'm not here to join Systemd holy war, it would be an off topic.

> Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system.

Listen: I learned unix by installing MkLinux on a PowerMac G3 (the beige kind that came with MacOS, the single-tasking cooperative OS from the '80s) in 1997. I built my first PC in '99 or '00 and ran Debian on it until the old glibc transition broke so much that I switched to Gentoo, and much later to slack & arch.

I've done the distro-shuffle. There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works. Everything is constantly being rewritten, and some percentage of it is egregiously, embarrassingly broken at the user-facing level.

In some ways it's even worse now than it was in the early 2000s. So after nearly 20 years of "you shouldn't have used distro X you should use distro Y", I think I'll pass.

And despite this rant in 3 years I'll probably be dumb enough to think "well maybe this time things are finally working well", yet again.

> There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works.

That's why it's advisable to use simpler stuff, not like the Gnome/KDE based systems, etc. Actually Linux works well enough for me.

I run ubuntu on a server at home. Every time I did a distro upgrade, it broke so much stuff (Nvidia drivers/mythtv/random other stuff) that I would have to fix, that I ended up not upgrading it from 12.04 until just a few weeks ago.

I decided to blow everything away and do a fresh install of 16.04. I wanted to have both Gnome and KDE on it, so I could have the choice of window managers. You're meant to be able to do that.

So I put a fresh ubuntu on it, and then the first thing I did was try to install kde. The kubuntu-desktop package install stopped halfway because of conflicts between Gnome and KDE packages, with just a cryptic error message about a background process having an error during package installation!

The failed install broke (both) GUI's and the apt package manager completely. KDE wouldn't launch at all and Gnome would come up with a blank screen and a mouse cursor and nothing else.

It took hours of googling to find the magic commands to actually remove the conflicting Gnome packages to get the KDE install to continue, and any GUI working. I have it working with just KDE now, but could never get it working with both.

A fresh install of the latest "long term support" version of the most popular distro, then I tried to install the second most popular window manager, and that didn't work. What a massive fail.

I actually love using Linux, and it's so refreshing to not be tied to corporate garbage on your PC, but unfortunately, Ubuntu/linux is 100% not ready for normal consumers. I really really hope it improves, but it always seems to be two steps forward, one step back. It's a bit sad.

  Photoshop Lightroom
  - Windows: both run fine (sometimes faster)
  - Linux: GIMP + darktable? Pretty capable really, but a lot of people have strong opinions on anything that isn't Photoshop + Lightroom
  Sequel Pro
  - Windows / Linux: MySQL workbench covers a lot of the same territory
  iTerm 2, Homebrew:
  - Windows: Ubuntu on Windows or (cygwin, mingw, console2) + (chocolatey, oneget, ...)
  - Linux: Plenty of solid options for terminal emulators, pick your favorite distro and it will have a solid package manager. I would argue that Linux has been doing terminal and package management longer and better than Mac + Windows
  Sketch
  - There have been a plethora of web-based UX/UI design tools in the last few years that don't suck.
  Transmit
  - I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'd just use the terminal, but maybe Filezilla?
  Alfred
  - A lot of built-in search and hotkeys on Windows and many Linux distros, add additional tools on top for a lot of flexibility.
  Reeder, Airmail
  - No suggestions here... looks nice
  Spotify
  - Spotify on Windows or Linux

Windows has decent HiDPI handling, but probably not as nice as Mac. Linux if you want to take the time to tweak it can work pretty well on HiDPI (I'm on a MacBook Pro running Linux in xfce).

No. Please. Not Gimp as "Photoshop". It may have some of the features but if more than a casual photoshop'r... Gimp will cause you pain.

Don't get me wrong, I think for free software Gimp is amazing and it works great for some. But not if you're used to the full Photoshop suite.

Haha.. like I said, some people have really strong opinions on this (and are really attached to one or the other). To be fair, there are rumors of professionals that use GIMP as a daily driver, but it's not a hill I want to die on.

For a developer, even a FE one, Gimp is typically enough. For a designer / UX then no, Linux is not there yet

Transmit -> Cyberduck for Windows. Not quite a polished, but still pretty slick.

WinSCP https://winscp.net/eng/docs/introduction too

> ... polish really find Linux or Windows that much better?

It's definitely not better when it comes to polish, it's worse. However, instead of the lickable polish of OSX, you get responsiveness that makes OSX feel laggy in comparison.

Under Windows at least, you still have Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. except I've found they run faster than under OSX. Whether I'm on my PC or my retina Macbook Pro, I usually develop under a Linux VM via VMWare, and VMWare is definitely much more responsive under Windows as well.

Regarding Homebrew, if you didn't want to use a linux vm setup, there's now the linux subsystem on Windows 10, which has worked well for the few things I've tried under it.

But yes, everything looks worse than OSX. I found I haven't cared as much as I originally thought I would, especially with the increased responsiveness and lack of beach-balls (you don't realize how used to beach-balls you are till you stop seeing them).

I recently converted my hackingtosh into a Windows 10 machine when the Windows Subsystem for Linux came out, and can testify to this. Windows nowadays really is a hyper-responsive OS, on the same machine/specs it outperforms OSX in every way. It took a bit to get my workflow back on track on the new OS, but since then I have not looked back, I don't miss it in the least.

I can't respond to all of the above but a couple stood out to me:

- iTerm2 is a far cry from my typical Emacs set up...I would take e-macs with ansi-term/shell buffers over iTerm2 any day (on Linux).

- Homebrew is a shim to get Linux-like packages to work in the limited terminal/shell environment of OSX (at least IMO). I would take `apt-get` over `homebrew` in a heartbeat.

- Spotify actually has a native Linux client and I have used it without a problem for awhile (https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/). Although it looks like it lost its dedicated developer earlier this year: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/spotify-linux-no-developm...

There is definitely a creativity suite void (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) but you could consider setting up a Virtual Machine on Linux with VT-D passthrough to be able to use those sorts of applications.

For me, I spend most of my time basically in a terminal or in an IDE...and for that, Linux fits quite well...but yeah...

> - Homebrew is a shim to get Linux-like packages to work in the limited terminal/shell environment of OSX (at least IMO). I would take `apt-get` over `homebrew` in a heartbeat.

Having a package manager that mostly keeps its hands off my core system is something I didn't realize I wanted until I tried Mac package managers (now using Homebrew). Keeping "update all the junk I've installed" and "update the system itself" separate is pretty nice, though it'd be trickier in Linux since the two concepts aren't as distinct, especially in GUI-space.

It's a common thing in the BSD world.

In theory, homebrew is inferior. In practice, I find homebrew is actually easier to use than apt/yum. For example, installing fonts or (de)installing GUI applications is simple and clean. brewfiles are awesome for machine setups. PPAs do make apt as powerful, but there's not always one for the thing you want. With homebrew, you can create your own "casks" (definitions) and tell homebrew to load them from e.g. github.

It's all great until some mysterious happens (maybe because you tried to install your version of ruby or XCode didn't like something) and then you have to start messing with brew doctor etc and you know you are doomed. But when it works it's great

I don't understand how you'd "miss" some of those. I use Windows (10) and love it and use Photoshop, Lightroom, and Spotify daily.

Support for high density displays on Windows is a lot better than it was 2 years ago, thankfully.

I think you are looking at this problem from the wrong perspective.

I was also making this mistake too in the past. You cannot beat MacOS in its own game, polished object-oriented Apps reminiscent of NeXTStep with a lot of indie offerings.

You need to realise polish means something different in Linux. It means classic open-source text-mode keyboard-driven file-configured programs that do one thing, do it well and are easy to compose in the Unix tradition. URxvt, emacs, vim, mutt, mbsync, zathura, irssi, etc.

Obviously most of these are portable and thus not exclusive of Linux. But you will get most of them in Linux, running a minimal tiling window manager like XMonad and a good package manager like pacman, nix or guix.

This takes time to master, but in my opinion can't be beaten and will not become out of fashion easily.

Unfortunately, terminal apps do not help with RAW editing, editing vector graphics or diagramming (replacing OmniGraffle).

For these reasons, if I'd flee from macOS, Windows would currently make more sense. There are better replacements for macOS applications and the Linux subsystem holds a lot of promise.

That is precisely the kind of polish that I love to have in my Vagrant instances. But it's not the kind of polish I want in my desktop environment.

"Rival" OS X? Meh... as far as I'm concerned, the Linux desktop experience exceeds OS X easily. Honestly, after being forced to use OS X daily for the last 6 months, I really don't see anything special about it, with the sole exception of iTerm2 which admittedly rocks.

I guess it's not so much the OS itself, but which tasks you want to perform on it. For instance, most of the programs the parents lists ("Photoshop, Lightroom, Sequel Pro, iTerm 2, Homebrew, Sketch, Transmit, Alfred, Reeder, Keynote, Airmail, Spotify"), I don't even recognize. I'm a computer scientist and probably spend most of my hours every day in front of a computer, but I must be working on completely different things and so most of the programs above don't mean anything to me.

Most of the functionality of my workflow is provided by other programs, but there is also a good portion that's provided by the actual OS -- mostly things like switching between workspaces, starting and closing programs, inspecting disk contents. (Of course, I'm omitting the fact that the OS is responsible for all that metal underneath to do something useful at all, but I guess all of the three major desktop OS's have that part covered.)

If your workflow depends on a functionality that is provided by certain tools/programs, and these tools/programs have no alternative on other OS's, then of course it will be difficult to switch. But I would say that in my case, either the same tool I'm using today is cross-platform and thus available on other OS's too, or the functionality that I need is available through some other tool. This doesn't seem to be the case for what the parent lists, but for me, I guess the main difference after a switch would be interacting across apps, not within apps.

Yes, I do find Linux better, for software development at least. Running on OS X @work, I would much rather run Linux XFCE and not bother with homebrew and having issues with iTerm. The HiDPI is better on the Mac though and app widgets have a uniform look. Virtual desktop switching is too slow on OS X. I can easily switch with my scroll wheel in Linux and move windows from a workspace to another by dragging them around. Maximizing windows sucks badly on OS X, I almost never do it - it now hides the title bar. Finder and the file/open dialogs are pretty dumb: no address/path bar. I could go on for days.

Spotify works the same across all three operating systems (it's a hybrid webapp now)

Keynote is easily replaced by PowerPoint

Sketch: you may be able to replace it in the next future with Adobe XD, that will also support Windows 10 and it will be an UWP app with support for pen and touch (Currently waiting for the first beta, it's due before the end of 2016)

I don't think many people find the OS better. It's the main reason people are still (stuck) with apple. I think most people want to jump ship because of the hardware -- despite it having a great polish.

Maybe we need a MACE emulator. How hard could it possibly be to run macos apps on linux? ;)

>I wonder if some design-minded Linux geeks will rally around making Linux on the desktop a polished enough experience to rival OS X?

Sounds like Elementary OS.

Spotify actually has had a native Linux client for ages now. Works pretty well.

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