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Comment by jclardy | Hacker News Reader

I took a look into linux recently, as a Mac user for the past 10 years. Ended up buying a Chromebook to mess around with it and it is pretty nice, but desktop linux is still missing so much software that I use regularly in macOS.

Also, finding suitable notebook hardware to run linux on is still a nightmare unless you enjoy spending time debugging the device that is supposed to improve your productivity. All the unique hardware is missing drivers (SP4, surface book) and things like touch screens and wifi drivers across more "normal" hardware is still finicky.

My main gig is iOS dev, so I obviously can't completely swap, but there just isn't any comparable hardware out there that can just run ubuntu out of the box (minus some exceptions like that dell developer edition xps.)

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Many articles about people switching from Mac to Linux laptop begin this way: "It's great, but my laptop can't handle sleep mode properly, network stops working from time to time...etc etc But I'm very happy!".

I have a mid-2014 13" retina MBP and it has its fair share of problems, namely:

* Screen coating wearing off and leaving horrible marks behind (I now use it plugged into a monitor more often than not)

* Inputs (trackpad and keyboard) occasionally lock up, usually when unplugging external keyboard/mouse. Closing and opening the lid sometimes fixes this, toggling bluetooth or plugging/unplugging keyboard also sometimes fix; failing that I have to power-cycle using the keyboard power button (the only button that seems to still respond)

* Wifi connection has all sorts of problems - access hangs for ~30 seconds every couple of minutes or so. This is very intermittent, and seems to be a problem with our home connection, but other devices don't appear to suffer.

I mainly bring this up because the latter two pretty much match your examples of linux complaints - Apple machines are far from perfect!

> Wifi connection has all sorts of problems - access hangs for ~30 seconds every couple of minutes or so. This is very intermittent, and seems to be a problem with our home connection, but other devices don't appear to suffer.

Which macOS version? Did you check /var/log/wifi.log?

Strangely my MBP 2010 has a similar issue, while my new MBP 2015 doesn't.

Still on Mavericks. I didn't know anything about /var/log/wifi.log so I'll check that later to see if I can spot a problem - thanks.

Did you try the solutions at [1]? Have you considered upgrading? Be careful you don't get into issues with DNS related to [2] in 10.10

[1] http://howtoapple.com/mavericks-wifi-issues-fix/

[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-i...

Regarding the input, if you can demonstrate that with a clean OS install that these lock up happen, it's a very good candidate for hardware replacement, assuming you have AppleCare which would still keep you in warranty till 2017ish.

I've had over 10 Apple laptops in the past decade, and wifi is one of the things that has always been rock solid. Whenever buggy wifi showed up, it was usually the cheap wifi router to blame, since buggy wifi would affect all the wifi devices.

I recently bought a XPS 13 Developer Edition and threw Fedora 25 on it without any issues. Now that there's a market for developer laptops, the chances of Linux working fine are much better.

Compared to my previous laptop (MBP 15" 2011) the trackpad sucks but it's small and fast. GNOME Shell has massively oversized window borders but the extensions platform makes it easy to fix with "Pixel Saver". Having the system package manager handle everything is nicer than each app having its own autoupdater + app store + homebrew.

I don't regret the switch.

That really gets me... They complain about macOS shipping old versions of git and vim (solved by `brew install git vim` during the first 2 minutes with any new system). But then are completely unconcerned about having to shut down/boot X times a day. But then again I've see to many friends with Windows notebooks habitually do that as well, and I may be special with an uptime that closely tracks the last OS update.

Could you make a (short) list of the apps (for devs?) missing so we could help you perhaps to find alternatives if there are any?

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